


Tilt-Shift

by foxghost



Category: Finder no Hyouteki | Finder Series
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Consensual Sex, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Eventual Happy Ending, Fix-It of Sorts, Friends With Benefits, Friendship, Healthy Relationships, M/M, Pre-Canon, Tooth-Rotting Fluff, Unrequited Crush, is it unrequited if you end up sleeping with them eventually
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-09
Updated: 2018-01-19
Packaged: 2019-02-12 09:58:21
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 57,293
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12956799
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/foxghost/pseuds/foxghost
Summary: Pairings are listed chronologically and treated with equal importance; not all love is romantic.Much thanks toGreen_Destinyfor beta-ing chapters 6&7. (Which is half the fic because Asami wanted a very, very long epilogue to himself and wouldn't let me stop.)Akihito meets Feilong first, three years before the events of Viewfinder.A trophy's usually someone important - the son of a rival faction, say - and not some random kid bleeding all over Feilong's suit at an Ikebukuro restaurant. Wrong place: Dai Ke Yi, a traditional Chinese banquet hall that's opened publicly until 3am, has a reputation for hosting either mob meetings or wedding receptions in its private rooms, for one which Feilong was party to.Unfortunately for the kid, it wasn't a wedding.





	1. 緣 (Yuen)

**Author's Note:**

> Warning for mention of past abuse, because Feilong. Finder no Rakuin manages to make his backstory even MORE tragic. Yikes.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> 緣分 : Yuen Fen : Fateful coincidence.  
> 緣 : Yuen : A chance meeting.

A trophy's usually someone important - the son of a rival faction, say - and not some random kid bleeding all over Feilong's suit at an Ikebukuro restaurant. Wrong place: Dai Ke Yi, a traditional Chinese banquet hall that's opened publicly until 3am, has a reputation for hosting either mob meetings or wedding receptions in its private rooms, for one which Feilong was party to.

Unfortunately for the kid, it wasn't a wedding.

Dai Ke Yi's a nice enough restaurant -picture-perfect authentic food, dark red panelled walls with golden dragons and dark red carpet, equally sanguineous table cloths to go with faux-antique ebony chairs. At 2am sharp, Feilong and his men had met with a branch of the Yamaguchi-gumi, concerning the defection of a certain White Paper Fan of Baishe's Shanghai branch and the disappearance of a shipment of cocaine.

By 2:30 am things had gone all sorts of pear-shaped; he's sent two of his guards out for reinforcements and half the Yamaguchi people had fled, Feilong's down to his last clip and the rest of his men - it was supposed to be a peaceful meeting so at least the casualties were few - were dead.

He had been reloading in the main public dining room when he was yanked beneath a table by his ankle, the table quickly tossed to its side, and the kid in some hare-brained attempt in saving him - seriously - had taken a bullet to the shoulder right beneath the left clavicle, missing his windpipe by mere inches. Feilong had been so startled that it nearly killed him; the shock of something so unlikely happening had him staring down at the teen-aged boy for a second too long, enough for a bullet to whizz right by his face, to singe the edge of his ear.

He let his rage carry him through the rest of that encounter. But as he had lifted the boy into his arms, the rest of that anger had dissipated. It's not a mortal wound by any means - even if Feilong left him there, he wouldn't have bled out. When the Yamiguchi-gumi comes back to check on the scene though -

Even his own sworn nemesis hadn't left Feilong to die, so he's not about to fall lower.

He had left the boy sedated, kept him in an empty room used for 'distinguished guests' outfitted with a hospital bed. Tao had asked, leaning over the bed rail to get a closer look, "Master Fei, who is this stranger you brought home?"

Tao had sounded hostile and not a little possessive, in the obvious way children tend to be - that was until Feilong had told him, "He saved my life."

"Oh," Tao had said, and a look of such wonder and pure awe came into his face so fast it left Feilong smiling. Ah. Tao could use a playmate, and this one is perfect.

At least, it's the perfect excuse, a good cover for the real reason.

In time, the boy will gain a star shaped scar just like his, in the exact same place as his. But while Feilong was given his through treachery, the one on the boy was taken with compassion.

He wanted it: it's a strange cosmic coincidence, like finding his scar's missing half, and somehow he feels the two may just cancel each other out.

* * *

When his men had begun questioning, in mutinous rumours and hushed tones, just why their Dragon Head has brought back a kid from their short trip to Tokyo and had the boy's gunshot wound looked after, he calls a hall meeting.

Feilong sits on a dais in his ornate chair and asks, softly - it seem to spook them, how the more angry he is, the softer he speaks, "And just which of you questioned my judgement?

All at once the hall is full of mumbling and bowing interspersed with the shuffling of feet. _We would not dare_ passes the lips of many, and yet they had.

"Didn't think so," he says, just low enough for everyone in the room to have doubts about their continued existence.

Yoh had already singled out the ones that started the rumours and the ones that delightedly and loudly repeated them; the first, bathroom duty, the second, wet market protection.

"Those who talk shit should learn to deal with it." Yoh had said, dry as a desert, his eyes sparkling with rare humour. "At length."

* * *

Takaba Akihito is a boy on the cusp of manhood, three months short of twenty. He's obviously reckless - that goes without saying - but less so obviously foul mouthed. The initial thought that he would be a good influence is mildly shattered by his background check: four times in juvenile detention, multiple suspensions in high school for fighting, somehow managing to graduate in between jail.

A report card from his sophomore year states, in point form: highly intelligent, under-motivated, unambitious, major issues with authority, problems at home. Feilong knows that any list of attributes tend to trigger a cold-reading response, but the feeling of camaraderie only increases.

Feilong's not the only one; Tao adores Akihito. By the time Akihito can move around without a sling, Tao has him graduated from Cookie and Cream, where the two of them share either side of a controller, to Lego Star Wars.

There is one definition of 'adore' that involves Akihito running headlong into danger while Tao falls repeatedly into lava, both of them swearing in as gutter-fishmonger-wet-market Cantonese as possible.

It's Akihito's third week in Hong Kong by the time Feilong gets back from Shanghai, installing a new adviser to that branch and cleaning house. Baishe's rebuilding is in its third year, and Feilong has accomplished an awful lot - control of most of Hong Kong and a web of trade routes from Macau to Shanghai. The Elder Liu had ruled with loyalty and soft power, but all Feilong can rely on is fear, strategic kidnappings and assassinations; this trip to Shanghai had been particularly bloody and all he wants to do now is smoke his pipe and fall into bed for a month.

But filial piety goes both ways, so he makes his way down from the helipad to Tao's room. The hallway is filled with the faint echos of laughter, and he finds himself - it's not possible, not with all the blood dripping from his garrote just yesterday - smiling.

Later on, he would remember this moment as the first in many that carries Akihito's magic, how he can drive even someone like Feilong to mischief.

He opens the door then, one palm flat against it to keep as quiet possible and says, "Now what kind of language is that to use in front of a child?"

Remarkably it's Tao who turns to him looking sheepish.

"Tao," Feilong says, "just because he didn't know any words doesn't mean you have to teach him to speak like a dockworker."

"I'm sorry, Master Fei," says Tao, dropping the controller and running to cling onto him. "I missed you."

Akihito just gapes at him like a fish, "Hey, you're that guy from the Chinese restaurant!"

"That I am," Feilong pats Tao on the head, and sends him out of the room with a gesture. "How are you feeling?"

"Um, I'm fine?" Akihito answers automatically. "Wait, you speak Japanese?" Then onto more pertinent matters, "Why am I a prisoner here? What am I doing in Hong Kong? When can I go home? What is this tattoo?"

"One thing at a time," says Feilong.

"Okay. When can I go home?"

"Give or take, six months," Feilong expects the subsequent outbursts, so he heads off Akihito's what and why with a firm touch to his uninjured shoulder so they can have their talk. "The Yamaguchi-gumi's looking for you."

"Whatever for?" Akihito is shocked, to say the least. Feilong silently appends 'oblivious' to the report card.

It's up to Feilong to lay it out for him, it's plain, but perhaps not to a civilian. "Oh, being at the wrong place at the wrong time. Seeing too much. Witnessing a gun fight in a country where guns are prohibited, by people who are known by the police. You can pick them out of a line-up."

"What if I tell them I won't do that?" Akihito must think the yakuza can be negotiated with.

"If I'd left you there, their cleaners would have come to the restaurant, dragged their men out, and put a bullet between your eyes before you can talk," it's cruel, but it's the truth. "And not even I can tell the Yamaguchi-gumi what to do. I have power here, but we're talking about the biggest yakuza group in all of Japan. I'm going to have to pull in some favours before I can send you back."

And that singular bridge is so burned he can't see the ashes.

Akihito's still hopeful, "What if I just, you know," his eyes move left and right, thinking. "Dye my hair? Disguise myself? Never show up in Chinatown again?"

"That is not going to work," sighing, Feilong places a hand over Akihito's. "You didn't have your wallet when I carried you out. Where do think it is?"

"I was ... buying takeout," Akihito's thinking, every thought showing on his face and Feilong can see the moment the cogs clicks together to the answer. "I had it open on the counter, and - must have dropped it when I heard the gunshots. Oh."

"They know who you are. They know where you live. They've already questioned your photography sensei because you had his card in your wallet." Because Akihito's eyes widen in fear and he wishes to soothe them, Feilong adds, "I don't think they'll hurt anyone connected to you. I took you out of the country before you can tell anyone what you saw, so your friends should be fine."

With his face in his hands, Akihito asks, "What do I do?"

"Stay here. Wait for the whole thing to blow over." Feilong takes one of Akihito's hand and squeezes, "Take care of Tao for me."

He lets the news sink in, but he knows it's hard for Akihito to accept this; he's already tried to run away twice. So in the evenings, when he's here in this room playing with Tao, his ankle's chained to the bed's leg. Yoh has been assigned to be his shadow. Even though he's far too capable to just babysit, he's the only one here that's fluent in Japanese.

"The tattoo ... ?" Akihito asks, staring down at their joined hands.

"It's the mark of Baishe. As long as you have that, you'll be recognised as my property. No harm will come to you in Hong Kong - no matter where you go." Feilong slips in a vague threat, "Even if you make it to the Japanese embassy, the guards will see that and send you back to me."

"I'm no one's property!" Akihito shows a rare flare of temper, the first Feilong's seen yet - the first that matches Akihito's rap sheet.

Such fire. Feilong can't help wanting to douse it a little, "Would you rather be someone else's property? I can arrange that. I know a few brothels who would love someone with a face like yours."

Feilong has terrorised people older and much more hardened than Akihito. When he allows that sharp coldness to come into his eyes, to let his mask of civility drop, the effect is immediate; Akihito looks at Feilong, disbelieving, but he's so clearly looking into the eyes of a killer that he has no choice but to take Feilong at his word.

"There are worse things," Feilong says, not elaborating.

Akihito has taken his hand back by now, and he's gripping the couch so hard he's sure to leave marks. After a few moments of tense silence, he says, "I guess there are."

Holding Akihito's chin with his thumb and forefinger, so the boy has no choice but to look him in the eyes, Feilong asks, "Have I, or anyone here, mistreated you?"

Still mulling over Feilong's threat to sell him perhaps, Akihito seems rooted to the spot, "No. Not exactly. I mean," Akihito rattles the chain leading to his ankle.

"I can't keep you safe if you keep running," Feilong says. "Is there anything you want? Ask for anything."

Akihito seems to think hard for a moment, "Can I call my friends?"

So he would stay.

Feilong lets the warmth flow back in, and gives Akihito an indulgent smile, "Yes. Yes you can."

* * *

Akihito's room is - excessively normal.

It looks like someone has taken a current year Nitori catalogue, flipped it to the page that says 'young adult bedroom' and brought it to life. There's a mostly empty bookshelf, a desk, a queen sized bed bolted to the floor - startlingly large, so much bigger than what Akihito had in Tokyo - and a closet half full of clothes: a few pairs of jeans, some t-shirts, and an assortment of tangzhuang and soft kungfu shoes. 

There's also a chain. It is a relatively long chain; it allows him to reach every corner of the room including the edge of the en suite bathroom.

But it is still a chain.

The room is down the hall from Tao's, so after his own afternoon Cantonese lessons, Akihito would be allowed out of his room to spend the evening there. The rest of the time he studies with a tutor in the morning, go over his lessons in the afternoon with Yoh, and in the late evenings he sits with Feilong and makes his tea.

Most of his time is spent here in this room. This oddity of banality in a building full of killers, with its soft blue walls and cartoon character sheets.

It has panoramic windows, and quite the view. Victoria harbour stretches out beneath him, with the city and the hazy mountains of Hong Kong Island lush and green even in the months before summer; in the night, it's lit up like Tokyo, bright lights and glowing neon, the city that never sleeps.

Each night Akihito sees it he yearns for his camera, wants to feel the touch of the trigger under his finger, to make the city containable, and not this monstrous maw that seems to consume him whole.

* * *

The phone calls go as well as expected. Akihito isn't instructed on anything specific to say except that Feilong's name is to be kept out of it, so he tells Takato and Kou mostly the truth. Men in black had already visited both of them, asking questions they had no answers to.

"Just be careful, alright, and don't tell them you heard from me," he tells each of them. The answer from both were comically predictable.  _You're telling me to be careful?_

He concedes that they have a point, but please be careful anyway.

Yoh stands by Akihito for each of those calls. Akihito's used to his constant presence by now; if he's not in his room chained to a bed, he's with Yoh, who stays near texting on his phone or reading reports or tapping away on a laptop.

Now he hands Akihito another phone - a cell, and a slip of paper with a number on it. "Call your parents with that. Give them the number."

Akihito calls them and leave the number in the voicemail.

"You're not going to tell them," Yoh asks, a rare moment of curiosity while holding out his hand for the phone, "you won't be back for a while?"

"I'm not going to bother worrying them," Akihito says, handing the phone back to Yoh, knowing it will rarely, if ever, ring. "They haven't been back in Japan since before I graduated."

Akihito wasn't making eye contact when he volunteered that bit of information, so when he did, to smile his reassuring  _I'm okay_  smile, he's not ready for the concerning pity what he thought of as habitually cold eyes.

"It's fine," he babbles, filling the silence that's comfortable already with Yoh that seems suddenly claustrophobic, oppressive. "My mom's a travelogue writer and my dad's a photographer so - it's their job. It takes them out of the country. I'm used to it. What a dream job, right?"

"Yeah," Yoh says, "sure." He pats Akihito on his good shoulder, lingers there long enough for the heat of his hand to seep through the shirt. "Doesn't make it right."

Compassion's such a strange thing; Akihito's coped with living along in a big house for years, been a latch-key kid since he can remember. But when someone else acknowledges your pain, it makes you realise t it actually hurts.

Akihito blinks away his tears, too proud to let them fall. All the way down the hallway, and back down through the elevator, Yoh leaves his scorching weight of a hand on his back.

* * *

In the late evening, he makes tea for Feilong.

It's really not much of a job - measure out the leaves, boil the water, wait for the water to cool a little, steep, and pour. At first, the tea was horrible. Feilong had made the first pot and had Akihito try it. It had been fragrant and light, delicate like the buds that fall like rain into the teapot. 

Akihito's tea was bitter or tasteless, sometimes managing to be both.

Now he makes the tea and follow the steps and count the steep time and thinks of - a dark room.

He thinks of his sensei's studio, the stinging sour scent of chemicals, the solitude of red lights, even the black bag where the film comes out of a canister and spooled. Tea leaves are like photo paper; exposed too long, and the picture disappears into bitter darkness; too short, and the image is faded and grey and tasteless. Akihito imagines a shot of his own profile, developer fixer stop, hanging on a wire, crisp and clear in black and white.

The tea is a distant proxy, and there's no spool to spin; but when Feilong sips the tea Akihito makes, he would smile approvingly, looks at him like he's more than he is, more than he could be.

Even tea can be intoxicating.

* * *

Feilong is - unpredictable, tempestuous, petulant, vain - the sum of which frightening.

To Akihito, Feilong is a lot like a beach. A beach is peaceful and calm most of the time.

It's something most people would want to be around; all beautiful sand and surf and endless blue. When it's calm you think you can live in it forever, lie in the fine white sand and dip your toes in the shallow water warmed by the sun. 

But sand doesn't hold heat. At night, all of it dissipates, and the cold of it will freeze you to the bone. When it rains there's no shelter, you can run for miles and there's no place to hide. There could be a distant earthquake under all the water, invisible and deadly silent, and the whole place could erupt in a crushing tsunami minutes later.

A beach is no place to live.

Some nights, when he sits with Feilong, he can see emotions flicker through his eyes so fast as to be impossible to catalogue.

He thinks that Feilong must live on that beach all the time.

In those moments, in those quiet in between hours Feilong used to spend on his own, Akihito would reach over the few inches between them - what once felt like a yawning chasm at first - and lace their fingers together. He'd feed his warmth into Feilong's cool hands.

Akihito would make a little visit, to dip his toes in the sand; Feilong shouldn't have to live there all the time alone.

* * *

In the interstitial hours between night and morning, Akihito likes to dangle his leg over the side of the bed, feel the weight of the shackle dragging down his ankles. The routines of each day are becoming mundane, as though his imprisonment is a given, how a human mind can get used to anything.

The chain breaks the perfect semblance of normality. Akihito's not sure how much himself he can be without it.

So in the night, he stares up at the ceiling, reminds himself that there's a chain on his ankle, and thinks of home.

Akihito experiences an atypical homesickness; home is a 1DK only slept in, filled with just the necessities, the irreplaceable crystallised time of childhood mementos still packed away in storage. It eats at him like a passing illness,  _nostos algos;_  a dull pain in his chest that throbs when he looks out at a skyline quintessential but foreign. 

City skylines are carved into us, Akihito thinks, chiselled by each day one lives rooted to a place, especially one with such recognisable edges. They're dead and alive at the same time; dead on their own but carried in their people.

The sight of iconic Hong Kong greets him in the morning and it - disturbs, a cerebral short-circuit, like he's always waking on the wrong side of the bed.

It's not his apartment he misses. Akihito misses sitting in a dive pub with Takato and Kou talking about nothing and everything. He misses walking the back alleys and graffiti covered streets. He misses the old shopping streets too narrow for anything but a small scooter. 

He misses the geometric vibrant chaos of Shibuya, the colourful electricity that runs through all of Akihabara, and most of all he misses - burning them all into manageable negative through his viewfinder.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Dai Ke Yi - literally translates to: very able. 
> 
> White Paper Fan - a rank in the triad. Financial adviser. The Triad equivalent of the Consigliere.
> 
> Changshan - traditional Chinese men's clothing. The words mean "long shirt." Cheongsam is traditional Chinese women's clothing. The characters are EXACTLY the same, but Changshan is the pinyin for long shirt and Cheongsam is an English loan word and exclusively refers to a qipao. (Yes, that bugs me EVERY TIME I SEE IT.)
> 
> Tangzhuang - Tang Suit. Casual traditional Chinese clothing for men. Comes in all sorts of colours, short sleeves, long sleeves, and thicker weights for winter. The thing Akihito was wearing in the manga when he was injured and making tea for Feilong ... though his was probably made for women. (it's in the configuration of the buttons)
> 
> Nostos algos -  
> Nostos: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nostos  
> Algos: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algos  
> Together, they make up the word 'nostalgia.'
> 
> See you next week.  
> 


	2. 墜 (Zhui)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> 墜 : Zhui : to fall.
> 
> In which Akihito has a bit of an epiphany; Feilong tries to help, and mostly succeeds.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As promised, it has been a week.
> 
> This chapter earns the explicit rating.

End of April in Hong Kong feels just warm enough to take a dip in the ocean. So, Akihito does - with all his clothes on.

Akihito's plans don't usually get past the first stage before he throws the plan out and decide to wing it. 'Cross that bridge when I get to it' is (one of) his motto(s), and it's gotten him into lots of trouble before, some of which involving police, and most of those involving his father at court glaring furiously; but Akihito's come out of it alive so far so he sees no reason to not take an opening when he sees it, having no one in his life to raise the question of survivorship bias.

No amount of threats can stop him from running. Threats mean very little when Feilong is just so lovely when he's not being threatening, and Tao spends so much time telling Akihito just how little those threats mean - Master Fei has a reputation to keep - that those threats mean even less. The cumulative effect has Akihito convincing 9-year old Tao that running away is a fun idea, every boy has to do it once or decuple times, and wouldn't it be fun to do it at least once with supervision, which Akihito assures Tao he is.

He has no idea how much he's proving Feilong right that Akihito's a terrible nanny, but with adrenaline buzzing through his veins he doesn't much care.

Tao, of course, is game, going so far as to say that if he comes along to supervise it'd be a field trip and not running away at all. So on a sunny last day of April, Akihito finds himself sitting on a railing bordering Kowloon Bay at the edge of a dirty wet market - with literal fish and chicken blood running through the streets - eating Kowloon conveyor belt sushi out of styrofoam clam shells.

It's awful, the way cheap sushi outside of Japan is categorically awful, what is mayonnaise and cream cheese. There's a pool of wrong soya sauce at the bottom of the box soaking into the rice of the kind of rolls a sushi-ya wouldn't even think of attempting, his chopsticks are splintery and the rice is warm - but freedom is delicious. If this is his last meal, Akihito thinks it isn't all that bad; his mouth's filled with smoked salmon as he dives into the ocean.

Suspended in midair, before his feet hit the water, Akihito hears the slap-clomp of leather soles on pavement and a long suffering sigh. He's nearly grabbed - and shakes the hand off. The water is freezing, icy, much colder than the subtropical climate he's expecting, and a body splashes down right next to him.

"Let me go!" Akihito shoves at Yoh, wearing an expression that's downright murderous, shirt and suit and tie wet and clinging. "I want to go home to Japan!"

Yoh holds him back against a suited chest with one arm, "You idiot. Just how far do you think Japan is?"

Akihito's flipped out of the water onto a fishing boat dock, parts of old Hong Kong with ancient wood soaked through and slimy with seaweed. Dragging himself out of the water, Yoh holds onto Akihito's ankle so he can't run away again.

His black car's just down the street. No one can drive into a wet market. Yoh orders Tao to get in the back, manhandles Akihito into the passenger seat and does up his seat belt for him as though he's a child.

"I can do this myself! I'm not a kid!" Akihito protests.

Yoh is furious as he pulls wet clumps of hair away from his face, red with fury like Akihito's never seen him. He starts the car and levels a look at Akihito, "Unbelievable. you're telling me that after the tantrum you just pulled?"

"I just wanted to -" get away, the highrise is getting claustrophobic, maybe he's acting out for attention again, like when pickpocketing had been the only way to get his father to stand in the same room. Akihito's pretty sure the last thought is true, and he blushes through the coldness of his cheeks.

"Hong Kong to Narita is a four hour flight," Yoh throws the child safety lock and fumes all the way back.

Tao gets to copy 'The Moon at the Fortified Pass' thirty times, and when he complains that he doesn't know half the words, Yoh gives him a dictionary.

"Please don't tell Master Fei," Tao makes the most convincing puppy eyes Akihito has ever seen. "Please please please."

"Fifty times," Yoh doesn't confirm whether he's telling Feilong or not.

Akihito tries the puppy eyes.

"No," is the only word he gets, and Yoh drags him down by the scuff of the neck - the collar of his shirt - down to Yoh's apartment and its bath. "Get all that sea water off of you and put on the bathrobe behind the door."

"What about you?" Akihito looks up and down at Yoh who's equally drenched.

Yoh says, "I'll be fine. Your teeth is chattering."

Then he notices they are, and Akihito's freezing, his jeans and t-shirt plastered to him evaporating the heat out while Yoh seems fine in his wet wool suit. Yoh walks off flipping switches, what Akihito assumes to be the floor heater, and Akihito closes the bathroom door.

Yoh's bathroom is enormous, probably why Akihito's been taken here instead of back to his own room. The bathrobe is soft terry cloth and very warm, also enormous, Akihito swims in it, the sleeves like bells way past his wrists, where it should come down to his knees it drops down near his ankles.

The robe is touching his bare skin, and fills him with a feeling he does not understand, like a child overtired and wrung out from playing, a strange out of body buoyancy. He's not sure if he's simply dizzy from the bath or had bad sushi, but stepping out of the bathroom into Yoh's space has him reeling a little.

From his vantage point Akihito catches Yoh's bare shoulders, his hair, overlong and usually just on this side of unkempt, is wet, slicked back with seawater. Hunched over in his armchair, Yoh's back is a mess of scars over tanned skin, and Akihito wonders how far they go.

Akihito looks away and coughs.

"Well, let's see then," Yoh says, pushing away from what he's working on with gloves over a table strewn with black metal parts and spray bottles.

Yoh standing up isn't helping Akihito deal with his own brain at all.

He's changed out of his wet wool suit into a pair of grey sweatpants. From the front, Yoh's covered in more scars - obvious bullet wounds, knife slashes, raised rough patches of skin from extensive bruising - over the kind of muscles you need to withstand recoil. With his hair away from his forehead, his face is all chiseled and angular surfaces, each with its own quality of reflected light. Akihito feels his mouth go dry and heat rising in his cheeks, prickling.

Then Yoh holds Akihito by the nape and touches his own forehead to Akihito's, bringing his piercing hawk eyes closer, and Akihito stops thinking entirely.

"You don't have a fever, at least," Yoh says, leading Akihito, who is feeling very much like he does have a fever, to sit on the couch and to pull a blanket over him.

Akihito isn't sure what he's expecting, but surely not this. "You're not mad?"

"Oh, I'm furious with you," Yoh spares a glance up. "You could have died. Because you're a fucking idiot."

"I would have been -"  _fine, I can swim_ , but Yoh cuts him off before he can get it out.

"Go ahead and stretch your left arm above your head," Yoh says simply, hands stilling from the task of cleaning his guns and he waits.

Akihito stretches his arm up and out and stops, not able to get past sixty degrees before the pain in his chest becomes unbearable. "Oh," he says, feeling like the idiot he's just been called.

"You don't have full rotation yet." Yoh says, going back to wiping down disassembled gun parts, "Maybe you can tread water with one arm, but you'd have had trouble even pulling yourself back up to shore."

"I'm sorry," Akihito says after a time.

Yoh doesn't say anything to that, but he does hand Akihito a pair of thin gloves and a microfiber towel, and begins spraying down more springs and slides. With each part he finishes spraying, he pushes them towards Akihito's end of the coffee table. "Buff those."

Before he had been shot with one, Akihito has never seen a gun outside of a movie. Yoh's living room is like a messy armoury, barebones exposed wood shelving with boxes of ammunition and guns. There's a shelf by the door with a kevlar vest on it, piled on top of a pair of black boots, shoulder holsters casually pushed in beside them.

The apartment has the feel of lived-in messiness, everything in its place but its place is no catalogue-chic like Akihito's room; Yoh can walk from the bedroom to the kitchen to the threshold and walk by everything he needs to go from sleep to readiness in minutes. It's a well used space, mired in Yoh's brand of comfort. Being in the middle of all of its ordered chaos is strangely intimate, like being surrounded by the man himself - oddly comfortable and warm while deadly dangerous, all of it in plain sight. Yoh owns terry cloth bathrobes soft as clouds, and Akihito's pretty sure the blanket on his knees is cashmere.

Gun parts are not guns. When Akihito was a child, he took apart a Pentax camera, and it's a lot like the slide he's holding in his hand; solid, heavy, reliably stationary. He's not scared of it the way he would have been if Yoh had just handed him a gun.

He's not afraid of Yoh either - never have been, not for a single second they've spent together. Objectively, he knows he should be. Yoh is a triad hit man, stays out late sometimes with his black ops and misses breakfast the next day, looking too ragged to sit with Akihito in the afternoons but choosing to do it anyway.

Yoh's a man who kills people at night with sniper rifles and checks for fevers with his forehead.

"Do you have a lot of siblings?" Akihito asks, apropos of nothing.

Yoh doesn't stop what he's doing, putting the first gun back together. "Why do you ask?"

"You're very good at taking care of people," Akihito says.

"Maybe," says Yoh, dodging the question.

Yoh is very handsome, Akihito thinks, wonders why he's always hiding his face behind a fringe. He has the kind of piercing intensity like Lau Kin Ming from Infernal Affairs, secretive and stoic.

"Never a straight answer, huh," says Akihito.

"Look around," says Yoh. "You're not going to like most of my answers."

Akihito knows what's in the rest of the room, he can dissect it, pick up the pieces and put together the man who inhabits the space, but he's staring at Yoh, like if he stares enough Akihito can figure him out. Unable to look away, Akihito pulls the blanket higher over himself after buffing up the rest of the parts, peeks out over the top of it hoping maybe Yoh wouldn't notice.

In middle school, Akihito has dated before. The expectations had been simpler then: kissing, fumbling behind a line of lockers, holding hands. Girls at that age never asked for more, and he didn't know how to give them more - either party too innocent for storage rooms and closed doors. A string of failed relationships had followed him through high school, until his reputation (yankii) got ahead of him and girls stopped asking him out. Akihito thinks he knows of the feeling of liking someone; you get along with them, do things together like movie dates and fast food, and not be afraid to touch them.

He doesn't know what this is - this desire to touch, to feel a raised scar that cuts across Yoh's chest that must have needed at least ten stitches, and feeling completely paralysed like the air between them could shatter if he tries.

"Maybe you do have a fever," Yoh's frowning at him. "I'll ring the kitchen downstairs for some chicken soup."

His face must be red - Akihito pulls the blanket flat out over this head, mumbles, "I'm fine."

"Please don't piss me off more than I already am," says Yoh, and moves away to get his phone.

Akihito decides then and there that he likes Yoh pissed off. Not that he likes violence, mind you - it's the just dishevelled, just off the hinge discomposure, the slight wild edge in Yoh's eyes he finds undeniably attractive. He knows what a crush is, he thinks, bubbling and sweetly saccharine, from the way Kou talks about his latest conquest; he knows what love is, from the way his father looks at his mother, a deep comfortable devotion. Akihito knows personally of appreciation of the aesthetic, understands attraction to idols and models. His experiences fall between friendship and fumbling, and he doesn't quite know what this is.

It's confusing the way his skin burns and wants, a fever that doesn't register on a thermometer having nowhere to go; it pools somewhere around his diaphragm like heartburn, lingering all through his chicken soup and after, a hunger newly awakened.

* * *

Akihito's excused from tea time with Feilong in the evening. At Yoh's insistence, he spends the night in Yoh's bed, and Yoh sleeps in a cot he's pulled up next to the bed - within arm's reach and a world away.

His sheets smell like machine grease and gunpowder, just a hint of citrus aftershave, and a lot of tiger balm. Akihito has fitful sleep and semi-erotic dreams of moving his body against a muscular chest, rubbing his cheek against short stubble, composure cut to ribbons by a pair of sharp eyes; he gets hardly any rest at all.

* * *

At breakfast the next day he makes evasive eyes over his congee and yaotiao, being allowed the yaotiao only after Yoh checks his temperature again and declares him fit for greasy food. The conversation is always sparse on one side, and now Yoh just assumes he's still feeling ill.

Tao gets grounded, no video games for the week, and they both get extra homework. They're sitting there in Tao's room stewing over rote writing, which takes hand-eye coordination and very little brain power, so Akihito has time to work through most of the stages of grief for his line of thinking until he's stuck at depression by 10pm.

The tea is boiled and steeped too long, managing to be both bitter and tasteless.

"Akihito ..." Feilong sets the cup down after a single sip, making a face. He pulls Akihito down into his lap a second after. "What's wrong?"

Reflexively, Akihito places both hands on Feilong's shoulders and pushes. "Nothing. Put me down."

He feels himself being dragged closer instead, and the lock in his elbows he releases lest he dislocates them. There's a hand on the back of his neck, turning him until their eyes meet, "Tell me."

Yoh's standing just outside, hands in his pants pockets and a cigarette dangling out of his mouth, too disciplined to lean against the wall.  Without thinking Akihito glances at the closed door, knows it's hopeless, not knowing he writes it all over his face.

When Akihito realises what he's doing he sees Feilong grinning at him like a cat that's gotten into the cream, and he blushes to the tips of his ears.

"Oh," he hears Feilong says, and Akihito hears it like from a great distance through the rush of blood to his cheeks. "You are adorable."

Like any nineteen year old boy being called anything close to cute Akihito opens his mouth to protest, just in time for Feilong to plant his lips over Akihito and snake a tongue into his mouth.

It's bitter, badly brewed white tea, but the kiss is sweet; Akihito can tell Feilong's trying to be gentle, taking little nips at his lower lip but never quite biting. He has a vague notion that he should resist, that they shouldn't be doing this, but it's nice and uncomplicated unlike everything else he feels, so it takes him exploratory long minutes before he pulls away.

His lips tingle as if beestung and his hair's standing on end, feels a pleasant buzz like all the blood's rushed to his brain. "Um, we shouldn't," he says, surprised at the hoarseness in his voice. "You don't even like me."

"I like you just fine," he's looking at Akihito with that approving smile again, the one that makes him feel mildly inadequate and drunk. "Do you mean you don't approve of me? Am I not to your liking?"

Feilong smiles up at him with the confidence of the chronically beautiful, strokes a thumb across Akihito's lower lip. It brushes just inside his mouth, makes Akihito half close his eyes, losing himself to a shudder.

"Well, no, I, " Akihito stumbles, can't tell Feilong he finds him unattractive because that would be a lie. "Um."

"If you want Yoh, all you have to do is ask. I told you I'd give you anything," that cruel edge is back in his eyes, the one Feilong threatens people with.

Akihito knows he shouldn't let Feilong play with his emotions so much, toss him around for fun, but he's been treading on himself all day, feels as frangible as fine china, and he really doesn't need Feilong making fun of him. Feilong must see it too and immediately backtracks, all concern and warmth again, moves his hands firm but soft over Akihito's shoulders, stroking down his arms.

"I was joking. Don't be mad," Feilong says, kissing Akihito light on the edge of his jaw.

"It's not funny," Akihito pouts.

"I know," Feilong says, his mood clouding over a little, as he does. "If I let you have him, it'd only hurt more."

Akihito doesn't know how easy he is to manipulate, to flip his concern from the round and round badgering of himself to caring about another, but it works - he's immediately shifting to affectionate curiosity. "What do you mean?"

"He'll brand himself into you forever," Feilong has his hand on the side of Akihito's neck, and he strokes at Akihito's earlobe, runs his hands down and down. "He'll always be the first thought on your mind when you wake, and you'll remember how cold his eyes were, when he had your heart in his grasp."

Feilong stops his hand where he knows Akihito's new scar to be, still a red, angry looking thing beneath the silk shirt he wears. "And it'll never fade. Never a day will go by when it hurts any less than the last."

In his chest Akihito feels a tugging answer, a tangible hurt that matches what he sees in Feilong's eyes: madness and hate and the need to lash out at something that isn't there in the room with them. Akihito meets those eyes, marvel at how someone can be so strong and so broken at the same time, and says, "Someone hurt you."

Akihito's not sure why he's allowed this, to be let into this sanctuary all inked in Feilong's darkness, but Feilong takes Akihito's hands and move them down to the line of pankou that fastens his Changshan, "go on. Open them."

As if compelled he does, though Akihito's hands are unsure and has trouble getting the first one open. Feilong just waits, patient, pulling the fabric apart as the last button falls away.

Startled at first, Akihito moves his hand down over Feilong's collarbone, and strokes his fingers over the scar - it's even on the same side, more faded than his, less pronounced and new. There's no doubting and questioning in the space between thinking of touching him and the meeting of skin. Akihito wonders what makes this touch so easy.

"Does it hurt?" Akihito hears himself asking, still leaning in, inches from Feilong's face and fingers never leaving.

Feilong takes Akihito's free hand, kisses the center of his palm, leans into it, "it reminds me of its presence some nights, when it rains."

"It rains a lot in Hong Kong," Akihito strokes his thumb over Feilong's cheek.

"It does," Feilong says.

It's Akihito who bends down to kiss Feilong this time, unhurried and softly open; he's gone this far in the past, at least, so he knows the courting of the tongue. He is surprised when Feilong takes over, sucks on his tongue, rakes fingernails down his back sharp through the silk. He doesn't fight it though, wants this comforting closeness probably as much as Feilong does, wants to answer that hunger in his eyes, though he hungers for someone else.

Akihito's pretty sure he's not what Feilong wants, either, but he's not afraid of touching Feilong and he doesn't feel like everything between them would break if they touch. He's getting hard, been half-hard since they started kissing, feels Feilong stirring beneath him as well; when Feilong smiles at him and carries him to the bed, he holds on.

Feilong's body temperature runs cold - always a little cool to the touch. But he has Akihito pinned down, body flush against each other, fingers laced together. Lined up, making room for each other hard and parallel and wrapped in silk, he thrust once - slow and deliberate, lets the friction go from root to tip.

Akihito gasps aloud.

"Do you feel sorry for me?" Feilong asks, rocks his hips in nudging, languid and shallow thrusts, unheeding of Akihito's hips urgently pushing back. "Is this pity?"

"No," Akihito says, as the friction builds between them slow and literally hot, silk trapping heat as well as anything when two bodies are pressed together, getting warmer by the minute.

"Then what, hmm?" Feilong ducks down to dip his tongue into Akihito's ear, lick over the shell there; moving down to nip at his throat. He says, in between biting and soothing the bites with his tongue, "why so obliging all of a sudden?"

Akihito wants Feilong to shut up, to come up here and kiss him, to speed up already - he feels worn out, somehow, tense and strung out and impatient, full of frenetic energy, wound up from lack of sleep. His heart's thrumming in his ears and there's a pulsing by his temple, and all the time Feilong keeps up that slow maddening slide, just short of enough.

"Come on, Akihito," Feilong bites down at the base of his neck, just short of breaking the skin. "Be honest. I've no feelings you can hurt."

That's a lie, Akihito thinks, and grounds out through gritted teeth, stifling a gasp, "'Cause it feels good."

"Was that so hard," Feilong says, wrapping his arms around Akihito so they're pressed tight together.

Akihito sighs in relief, hands freed, he chooses to hold Feilong down with them, to feel his whipcord muscles tight on his back, to bury his face in the hollow of his neck. Moving is impossible for him, tightly held down - safe, protected - but Feilong's thrusting against him in earnest, the heat of him burning all the way down Akihito's cock.

It's easy and simple pleasure, and as Akihito knows he's so close, the muscles in his thighs tensing up in anticipation, he turns his face upwards, searching. Feilong doesn't disappoint him, just smiles down then slants his mouth over Akihito's, soft and undemanding.

Akihito feels himself come apart, shuddering up into it, feels Feilong drink in his moans and suck on his tongue. It's a slow and scorching unravelling when he comes, every part of him present, with Feilong's silky hair fanning over his cheek, Feilong's chest bare against his shirt, heated, covered in a sheen of sweat, Feilong's legs side by side with his own, all lovely and tangled up and satisfyingly sweet.

He shudders out a breath when Feilong lifts, puts a bit too much pressure down there between them where he's oversensitive.

"Um," Akihito says, the moment of urgency over and suddenly shy. "I -"

"Should really take these clothes off," Feilong finishes the sentence, not the one Akihito started.

It makes Akihito giggle, already lightheaded and giddy in the afterglow. "That's not what I was going to say."

"You still should." It's a wicked, mischievous grin, and it looks good on Feilong, takes years off of him.

He's half undressed already, his buttons undone and most of the Changshan's all pooled around his waist; a quick pull to the drawstring and Feilong kicks the rest of it off the bed, coming back to rest kneeling between Akihito's legs.

Akihito can't help it; he's just developed his first real crush and now he's in bed with someone else and he compares. Feilong is sinewy and lean, skin a pale and flawlessly smooth alabaster save for a couple of scars. His hair falls around him, wraps curls over his shoulders, dropping just to the waist, the ends tickling at Akihito's knees. Between his legs his cock juts out a dark rose pink, its head glossy from precome.

There's a grin on his face like he can read Akihito like an open book, and all the words written there desires him, finds him appealing, knows just how Akihito is very, very curious about what's to happen next.

Akihito starts saying, "um, I haven't," it's a bit late to come clean about this, but his inexperience is about to show in about five seconds, so. But talking about sex is much harder than having sex, so he only manages more um's and uh's before Feilong swoops in to save him.

"Haven't done this with a man before?" Feilong says, leans his weight on his elbows over Akihito, his hair cutting the light into strips to fall across their skin.

"Yeah," Akihito admits, and feels the pinprick of blush on his cheeks while he does so.

"I'm not going to do anything that's scary, okay?" Feilong kisses him on the tip of the nose. "We won't go that far ... tonight."

Akihito thinks of his own reflection in the mirror; he's athletic, but he knows he's not gorgeous and cut, not the way Feilong is, with a body honed by martial arts and plain blessed by genetics, all fine bone structure and undeniably beautiful. He's never been propositioned before, never had a man find him desirable and voice it; the girls he had dated called him 'cute' but that's as far as compliments go - he keeps wishing he'd gain more height but it never happened.

"Are you sure I'm," Akihito looks to the side, anywhere but right at Feilong, "okay?"

Feilong laughs, and it's not the first time he's laughed with Akihito in the room, but this time it's darker, has a wild edge to it. He crawls closer, rubs his hardness against Akihito's thigh, "Oh, you're more than okay." He leans in, whispers close to the shell of Akihito's ear, "Look at how much I want you."

Then Feilong's unbuttoning the pankou on Akihito's shirt, pulling off his oh so very ruined silk trousers, and pressing him into the bed. His mouth is hot on Akihito's neck, on his collarbone, kissing soft over the scar, the hair that follows him dragging pleasant warm trails over bare skin. Feilong draws one nipple inside his mouth and Akihito keens, forgets entirely how loud he's being, has no idea he's so sensitive there he feels it tingling on his back, feels an answering twitch in his groin, hot enough to immolate, hips rocking upwards trying to get closer, more friction, anything, as Feilong holds him still.

Feilong spreads a hand over Akihito's chest, where it feels unbearably hot and the hand is cold, turns his nipples into hard pebbles. "You're so sensitive," he says, and Akihito's not sure if that's a good thing but Feilong's smiling so he surmises that it is.

Feilong moves downwards, kisses over the bottom edge of his ribs, ticklish, runs his tongue over the line of his hip where it runs a V down his cock, and kisses the shaft, open-mouthed.

"No, don't," Akihito says, not at all wanting this to stop but it's so embarrassing he could die, "it's dirty, I just -"

"Came?" Feilong licks all the way up the shaft, pulls the crown into his mouth.

Akihito's not sure what he's saying at this point, but probably blasphemy, with Feilong somehow managing to smirk at him with a cock in his mouth. The inside of Feilong's mouth is - soft, tight, incredibly hot - impossible, rough tongue and soft sides and hard teeth that barely scrapes at him.

"Let me," Akihito pushes, gently, at Feilong's shoulder. It feels amazing, but he's feeling adventurous, very much inquisitive, and he recalls how beautiful Feilong had looked there hard and aching.

Feilong's mouth come off with an obscene sounding pop, entirely by design, coming up grinning.

"You haven't come yet," Akihito says, crawling down towards Feilong's hips as he speaks.

"I'm an adult," Feilong says, still grinning. "You don't have to."

"You're like twenty-five. You're barely older than me," Akihito says, though when they first met Feilong seemed older, colder and more aged than most adults he knows. "Stop putting on airs and let me."

Akihito licks at the tip first, then moves along the shaft, tasting it - the tip is a little sticky, salty from precome, the shaft taste like the faint salt of clean skin, and he laps at it with long licks of his tongue. He's hooked his right arm around Feilong's left thigh, and now he nudges the cock into his mouth, pulling Feilong in with his arm. It slips into his mouth easily enough, halfway.

When he hears a moan from the other side of the bed and encouragements, he tries to take more of it in; it's harder than he thinks - he can either breathe or swallow cock and hasn't figured out how to do both yet.

"Breathe in through your nose," Feilong says, sounding ragged. A muscle in his thigh jumps in Akihito's arm, like he's trying hard not to thrust into the mouth on his cock. "Leave your mouth open, yes that's it, breathe out through it -"

Akihito does what he's asked and takes it all the way down, gratified at the sounds he's getting out of Feilong for his efforts.

Then he feels Feilong's finger prodding at his ass, just touching, and it's strangely sensitive, impossible to ignore, even more so when Feilong starts to slowly push a finger into his ass. He pops off enough to say, "what are you -"

"Shh," Feilong says, one hand flattening down Akihito's cock against his stomach and a hot mouth sucking at his balls, distracting him from the invasion where it burns, uncomfortable and odd - until Feilong gets past the second knuckle and crooks his finger, and Akihito thinks he sees stars, it's so good. "Found it."

"Oh my god," Akihito feels - boneless, like every time Feilong nudges at that spot inside of of him with his fingers, and if he's a marionette it pulls all his strings at once. It makes his eyes water, "I can't -"

"You can't what?" Feilong says, sounding extremely proud of himself.

"- Touch you. Want to touch you," it's getting damn hard to focus, but Akihito tries again, "let me."

"Well, get off my leg and open up." Feilong stops pushing at him inside, at least, lets Akihito relax a little to back away from his impending orgasm, and slides his cock back into Akihito's mouth. "Now lie on your side, relax,and hold onto my waist. That's it."

Akihito holds on, and lets Feilong fuck into his mouth. He's pushing in shallowly at first, long slides timed to his breaths so it's never too much. His finger is nudging Akihito on the inside again, at the same rhythm as his cock, a hand wrapped over Akihito's cock and tugging him at the same time; and it's awfully erotic being fucked from both sides - it's slow and easy, and the soft pressure pushing at the back of his throat makes his cock twitch.

The discomfort he's been feeling all day gathering below his heart's dissipating; it's found its home, a pressure building in the base of his spine, all wrapped up in the cold heat of Feilong, until it's bound to spill over. The cock in his mouth's gradually growing ever harder, and he tries to lick at it, slide his tongue under it, hollow out his cheeks in between breaths - ah, even Feilong cusses like a dockworker sometimes.

Akihito doesn't have time to be snug; the moment Feilong spasms and comes down his throat, his finger pushes insistently within Akihito, harder and unrelenting this time - and he quickly goes from comfortably on the edge to shuddering orgasm. It hits him in the tightness of his thighs and the taut panes of his stomach, skin wrapped too tight over his back and the hair standing on end at his nape; blinding whiteness behind his eyes. Distantly, he knows he's making some very embarrassing noises, doesn't sound like himself, he's coming all the way from the base of his hips to the tops of his knees, it seems.

Feilong's disentangling himself, pulling Akihito's arms away and he thinks -  _don't go_ , grabbing onto him stubbornly, but his limb's gone all liquid so Feilong just slips away from him, kisses back up Akihito's body, on the wing of his hip and his ribs and lingering just below the scar, delighting in all his aftershocks.

"Better?" Feilong has a look on his face that says he's found his newest toy, and Akihito's not sure how he feels about that, but he feels much the same, like he wants to do all the things he's read in books with Feilong, just to see what would happen.

"Mm," Akihito manages, rendered inarticulate for the moment. He burrows his way into the circle of Feilong's arms, bumps his head against Feilong's chin like a kitten.

The sheets are dirty, their clothes are a sticky mess on the floor, and Akihito's not sure how he's going to get back to his room; but if he'd have looked up then, to witness for a second how Feilong's looking at the top of his head, how his eyes burned with fierce protectiveness, he may just shift his affections and fallen in love with him right there.

"When you wake up in the morning," Feilong says, just above a whisper, breath stirring the whirl of Akihito's blond hair. "You'll feel better."

"I feel good now," Akihito says.

It makes him smile, how honest he is, but Feilong elaborates, knowing it'd make Akihito sleep better, "I mean about Yoh, silly boy."

Yoh. Right. Yoh who's standing guard outside and will know he's spending the night and who'll probably bring him fresh clothes in the morning. Oh my god. He voices the last thought aloud.

Feilong laughs at him, the bastard. But the laughter comes between kisses to his forehead so Akihito forgives him immediately, "I've put your heart in a jar, Akihito. Where it can't get hurt."

"Why do you speak in riddles," says Akihito.

"You'll understand when you're older," says Feilong.

"Well," says Akihito, rolling Feilong on top of the wet spot and pulling the blankets over them, ready to fall asleep any second. "Fuck you."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> On sushi outside of Japan - cheap is always bad. Actually, with the conveyor belt sushi in Kowloon it's usually just not that fresh and way too expensive. Akihito is having ... cheap Vancouver sushi, probably. 
> 
> Yaotiao and congee - Fried Chinese donuts and plain rice porridge = not at all balanced breakfast but definitely traditional and very typical.
> 
> pankou - the traditional knot and loop button on changshan.
> 
> *  
> I changed all the asterisks to hr because I realised that my ebook reader doesn't like them, and maybe yours neither. 2nd draft is now over 30k, but it's still going to be 7 chapters. 
> 
> See you next week.


	3. 衛 (Wei)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Akihito is left alone to fend for himself, and he fights in the only way he knows how.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wei is written as 衛, literally translates to "guard," in a compound word it can mean "one who protects." In a name it can also mean "great."
> 
> Happy Friday!

Akihito is no wiser and only marginally older by morning, with a mild ache in his jaw and a sore throat, hurting all over from the odd configurations people tend to get into when sleeping with someone unfamiliar.

He does not understand yet what Feilong means, that his heart is in a jar, but he doesn't feel brittle anymore, the knot in his stomach hardly even a memory. In the week after, he'd notice his nights with Feilong wears down the edges of his awkwardness, he's able to meet Yoh's eyes once more, able to make one-sided conversations over his rice noodle rolls and not jump out of his skin when they accidentally touch.

It feels like depth of field; more light more experience gives him the choice to shift focus from one pane to another, softening the hurt of rejection into something that nearly glows. The image in his viewfinder is there, ready for him to dial the manual focus back to where he wants it, but Akihito can choose to look on this one safe haven with Feilong for now, letting the rest fade out.

At precisely 12:01am on his 20th birthday, Akihito's tipsy on prohibitively expensive sake, his knees are hitched up around his ears and Feilong's buried up to the hilt in his ass. Akihito passes out sometime at the end of the fourth round crying into Feilong's mouth and wakes up hours later with Yoh carrying him loosely wrapped in a thin blanket, arms arranged around Yoh's neck, head tucked under his chin, halfway down the hall between Feilong's room and the elevator.

Akihito catches the scent of gunpowder on Yoh's pressed suit, citrus aftershave, cigarettes and ashes and the copper tang of blood; it's probably twisted, wound all up in new emotions and overdue self-discovery, but that danger's become home. His head's filled with cotton, probably the sake hangover, so he doesn't think twice about it, and tightens his grip so he can close that last couple of inches between them and kisses Yoh square on the lips.

In surprise more than anything probably, Yoh opens up a little, and Akihito reflexively licks into his mouth. It's honeyed and electric, his lips positively buzzing at the touch of Yoh, so good his eyes roll back into the back of his head - until Yoh pulls back and reality falls on Akihito like a bucket of ice water.

"I'm not Feilong," Yoh says, as Akihito blinks up at him cheeks flaming and blissed out from just a kiss.

"Oh," Akihito says stupidly - at least as much as he can pretend to. "Mm sorry."

Whether Yoh buys it or just pretends he does that Akihito is still hung over and disoriented, there's no way to know, but the gates slams shut into place somewhere in the amorphous boundary between them, like they've never been opeend; Akihito finds it confusing what he's allowed and what is not, how Yoh can draw him a bath and help him get into it, how Yoh washes his hair for him, sitting on a stool at the edge of the tub with his shirt off, how Yoh bundles him into that bed that smells like CLR with some aspirin instead of ushering Akihito to his own room just so he can keep Akihito close enough to watch over.

Akihito touches his lips - runs the pads of his fingers across them, over and over - when he's alone again, sent to his room at the end of the night. He falls asleep thinking about how different it feels to kiss someone with hopeless infatuation soaking the fuse, fantasizes having those lips all over his body when even one kiss feels like too much.

His dreams are soft-focused and peach coloured, much like they had been the night before; he does not think of Tokyo's edges and sharp corners, relagating them to the bokeh.

* * *

Feilong buys Akihito a digital camera for his birthday, no larger than a deck of cards with a huge LCD on the back, with the added gift of going anywhere in Hong Kong as long as Yoh's free to play chaperone.

Akihito takes Tao with him, makes Tao read the guidebooks as he fills up the memory card with landmarks and endless snaps of concrete jungle. Behind them, Yoh trails them like a parent with two rambunctious boys, looking indulgent and very mildly annoyed.

They make Yoh drive them all the way to Tai Mei Tuk through unpaved country roads, spends half the day flying kites and the other half fishing on a rented boat. Akihito learns that Yoh can do anything, from starting a fire to picking out just the right lure to fixing a broken kite. He sits with Yoh by the fire and eats half the wings off his plate, only to have Yoh fill Akihito's plate with more food while musing about kids and their bottomless stomachs.

It hurts, but Akihito doesn't want Yoh to stop.

The little effervescent tingle in Akihito's head that used to make him feel light in Yoh's presence is gradually turning into something deeper, something permanent, growing wings; something that can very much tear him apart if it ever becomes big enough to claw its way out of him.

* * *

Midsummer, between typhoons, with the heat shimmering like the world's behind watered glass and shroud-like humidity settles over everything, Feilong leans on Akihito's shoulder in the garden of his old family home, a sprawling mansion in The Peak, and tells Akihito of the whirlwind romance that lost him his heart and his family all in the same night.

When the story is done, with the magnolia blooming crimson and the sky an infinite cerulean, Akihito pushes Feilong into the grass. Feilong's lips are cold, as if just the telling drains him of all warmth, and Akihito can try and try, feed his boundless heart into Feilong by the spoonful, and it still will never, ever be enough.

"What's his name?" Akihito asks.

"It doesn't matter," Feilong says, his hair fanning out behind him in the grass.

The day is so bright and saturated, all reds and blues and greens, that Feilong looks washed out and monochrome in his grey and black silk changshan. Akihito combs fingers through his hair, brushing soft over his cheek; he's pale and drawn and cool to the touch, his eyes unfocused as though they're seeing some place too far into the past, where Akihito can't reach, where Feilong's fading away.

"Don't lie to me," Akihito says, willing Feilong to focus on him instead. "It obviously matters to you."

"Asami Ryuichi," Feilong says, whisper soft. His eyes live for a moment when the name is spoken, a distant passing storm.

Akihito doesn't notice the wet tracks on his cheeks until Feilong's wiping at him with a sleeve, "You would cry for me?"

Akihito's a mess, can't see straight for the tears, his heart's never felt heavier, "You mean you didn't?"

"I ... haven't been able to cry since I woke up in that hospital," Feilong says. He wipes at Akihito's cheeks, marvelling at how Akihito can look exactly how he feels, and now it's like looking into a mirror - how Feilong himself feels on the inside, but can't for this impenetrable mask. "I can't cry," he says, aloud, wonders why his voice is gravelly all of a sudden, what this pressure is at his temples, why his lungs feel so tight.

Summer in Hong Kong lasts forever, especially in this garden where time seems to stop, where it is mercifully silent as a vacuum. Overhead, waxwings fly, dragging red wing-tips through the air; magnolia petals drfits down from the trees; on the grass, they lie without a sound, Feilong's shoulders mutely quivering in Akihito's arms.

* * *

Feilong leaves for Macau for almost the entirety of September, taking Yoh and a quarter of his men with him.

"I'm going to meet up with some old friends," Feilong had said, before boarding the helicopter on the roof. "You'll have an answer to the Yamaguchi situation when I get back."

It fills him with an icy dread, but Akihito's not sure which answer he's dreading.

Akihito gets a new guard named Xiaohai - little ocean, which is really a misnomer, but the Cantonese likes to put xiao in fron of the names of all little brothers - and he's not allowed to go anywhere outside of the building until Yoh comes back. The only upside is access to the rec room, with old worn pool tables and ancient furniture that Xiaohai insists are from the basement of the old LIu estate.

They're probably castoffs from one of the many clubs Baishe owns, but Akihito doesn't want to burst his bubble.

Tao stays up with him as late as he can to kick Akihito's ass in every video game he owns, but by around ten he ends up in the rec room, trying not to stand out.

This is, of course, impossible.

There are a lot of new faces, some of whom don't even speak Cantonese, and Akihito surmises that they're probably from the mainland, staying here temporarily to fill in for the ones that left for Macau.

After six months in Hong Kong with lessons and full immersion, he can understand water cooler gossip enough to know he isn't liked, being a foreigner and especially a Japanese foreigner, and gay on top of all that. But from what he hears, Feilong's become nicer, fairer, more focused on his work since Akihito's arrival, and not to mention 'the kid took a bullet for the boss' is a major talking point.

The men remaining are vouching for him, he thinks, that's why they're talking him up to the new guys.

Friday nights and over the weekend, the building's usually quiet, most of the suits having to guard clubs and bars and Akihito guesses, loan shark offices, that Akihito ends up in the rec room all by himself. It's the first Friday since Feilong left just three days before, and Xiaohai's acting antsy, probably has a hot date he wants to get to but got stuck with babysitting.

Akihito's playing snooker against himself when someone new walks - no, saunters - into the room, takes a seat next to Xiaohai and starts chatting in the way of old friends.

When a language is new it takes effort to pay attention, but Cantonese is clipped and rough and invasive, and Akihito catches snippets whether he wants to or not. Also the newcomer is the most handsome man he's ever seen outside of a fashion advert, so his brain decides to pay attention whether Akihito wants to or not.

"... Club downtown ... watch ... Japanese boy..."

"I can take your shift if you want - there's only three hours left anyway, right?" The stranger says, and Akihito goes from half paying attention to snapping to it in a half second.

"Oh, I'm not sure that's such a good idea," says Xiaohai. "Even Yoh can't keep this kid from running off sometimes."

"He likes to run, huh," says the stranger, and Akihito catches a glimpse of attractive mischief. "You know something though? I was just at La Vie, and your girl's sitting at the bar all by herself."

Xiaohai's face crumples, "But it's my head if he -"

"He won't," the stranger says, smiling with the surefire confidence of the good looking. It's a good smile, carried by a good face, and it's too easy to place your trust in. "I'll catch him if he does."

Xiaohai goes within a minute, mumbling apologies to Akihito.

"I'm Wei," the new guys says in metro-Tokyo Japanese, holding out a hand. "Nice to meet you, Akihito."

Wei has a firm handshake, dry and cool, and he keeps eye contact the whole time.

"I'll be in your care," Akihito says and unabashedly checks him out.

Wei's either not wearing his guns or has his jacket custom fitted to hide his holsters. The buttons are done up unlike all the other triad men, so, guns probably either side of the chest because he must be wearing them, but Akihito can't spot the weight. His neutral expression is a mildly sardonic, lopsided smile, which goes perfectly with his hooded eyes and cupid bow lips all set in good bones, but he only shows it in between a wide, interested grin and a gaze that is full-on undivided attention; a potent combination of perfection and mystery.

Akihito can only think that a triad man who doesn't need guns is probably more dangerous than the ones carrying.

"Where'd you learn how to speak Japanese?" Akihito asks midway through their game of darts.

"I was an English teacher in Tokyo. One of those private programs where they pay for room and board," Wei says.

Akihito's not sure if he should believe him, "You speak English too?"

"I majored in English lit. At Oxford," Wei grins at him.

Wei grinning is hard to look away from; he's all white teeth and twinkling eyes. Akihito throws a dart and manages to bounce it off the board, "And ... you settled on a life of crime."

"It wasn't exciting enough for me," Wei says, and when he goes to pick the dart up off the floor, he trails a finger down the back of Akihito's arm. "You're throwing too hard."

"Anything you're not good at?" Akihito's pretty sure he's being seduced, and he's not sure how he feels about it - what would someone like Wei want with him?

Wei pushes the dart back into Akihito's right hand, and so casually, as natural as breathing, he places his left hand on Akihito's hip and fixes his stance, "Three fingers on the dart, arm straight out at the triple twenty, curl up and throw with your elbow."

It's not by much, but Akihito misses and his dart lands just underneath and hits the twenty on black. "Hah."

Wei lets his fingers trail off of Akihito's hip, "It takes a bit of practice."

Akihito makes it to the rec room every night, and every time he arrives, Wei's already there. He's not sure what Wei does for Baishe; even Xiaohai doesn't know, but everyone knows of a 'Wei' that flittles between cities for Baishe for at least eight years.

Wei is the only one around that doesn't smell like black powder and gun lube. That smell used to give Akihito nightmares, flashes of walls in a Chinese restaurant, can't see where the blood begins and ends, but he's gotten so used to it that Wei stands out.  _And just how messed up I am if I think not smelling like guns makes him suspicious_.

"So, tell me about yourself," Wei says the next night, over a game of poker.

"I'm sorry?" Akihito says. Xiaohai's with them tonight, reading a book on the leather couch. It explains why Wei's electing to do something that involves a whole table's distance between them.

"You know all about me," hardly, and Wei just leans back and turns over his cards. "Two pair. So. What were you doing with your life before this?"

"I was a student," says Akihito. "Photography."

"Hmm," says Wei, unimpressed.

Akihito tries not to look offended, "What?"

"I was expecting something more ..." Wei deals with two new cards each. "Exciting? Thrill-seeking?"

When Akihito was in high school, he squeaked by mostly on charm and aggressive networking, leveraging favours (photo evidence of teacher-student misconduct) for notes and tutoring from the seniors. At the end of second year when everyone had to take home their future plans to discuss with their parents, Akihito gave himself detention (cherry bombs, multiple, staff bathroom) and sat alone in a classroom as twilight slanted onto this desk, let the ambience of busy walls and scratched up desks lull him into some kind of career auguring trance.

No many how many years he'd spent thinking about it, the future is still a black box when he was 16, its paths innumerable. Akihito's good with a camera, always had a natural eye for framing that even some pros would envy, and so sharp he got called into the guidance counselor's office for not making enough effort, for not utilising his perfectly good brain. His writing's decent and his math was absolute shite; the track and field team'd been trying to recruit him for years - Akihito's famous for outrunning the disciplinary committee any time of day slash year.

No one had ever accused him of being dumb - quite the opposite - but even he knew he was unmotivated. Akihito found most things from school to clubs not worth his time. He could have followed in his father's footsteps, took pictures of landmarks in strange countries, spent a lifetime discovering hole-in-the-wall restaurants, but he wanted to cast his own shadow; even thinking about being the 'next' Takaba and locking himself into a life like that sounded like an end and not some grand beginning.

It would have been easy. Even as a thought experiment, easy was boring as hell.

Akihito flipped through book after book of career lists relating to anything camera-wielding, choosing to sit alone in a classroom versus alone at home, and he settled on a career like love at first sight, it had: long hours, stakeouts, crazy deadlines, espionage and dangerous assignments, the art of solving the world like it's one big Rubik's cube - investigative journalism.

He has no plan to spill any of that to Wei, "That depends on what you're taking pictures of, doesn't it?"

"Let me guess. You want to embed yourself as a war photographer in Afghanistan or something?" Wei pulls an answer fully formed out of his head.

"Wow." Akihito says, sounding truly surprised, "You've managed to find something even more dangerous than what I was already planning."

"I'm flattered," Wei positively preens over that. "But you're not going to actually tell me?"

"Not unless you tell me what you do for Baishe," Akihito says.

"No can do," Wei shakes his head and goes all in.

Akihito folds - he only has a pair. It turns out that Wei had nothing, but by the ludicrous rules of Poker, Wei still wins.

"What's your idea of 'thrill-seeking'?" Akihito asks, circling back.

Wei crooks a smile - so ruthlessly sharp it cuts, and his eyes flashes predatory for a mere second. He doesn't look away when he shuffles the cards, but he does school them into something practiced and seductive, "Can I call you Aki?"

*

* * *

Wei brings him gifts of Nissin ramen bowls and matcha Kit-Kats and issues of ASAHICAMERA, reminisce about his years in Tokyo, and calls him Aki. There are no sexual overtures to his advances, and he comes off as downright gentlemanly right up until his back's to Xiaohai, and then he looks at Akihito as though he's the most desirable thing in the world.

"I wouldn't mind going back," Wei says, over Snooker, sinking one ball after another like he's a world champion. "I miss Japan."

"Hmm," Akihito says. He's not about to say  _so do I_  - Wei expects him to, practically baiting him. "What do you miss?"

"Kaiseki and onsen, in that order," says Wei, finishes the game and starting to set it all up again. "Good sushi. Izakaya. Taiyaki with anything but red bean paste."

"You like good food," Akihito can relate to that, misses heading to an izakaya with his friends too. "There has got to be good sushi here."

"I wouldn't know - I'm not from here," says Wei, volunteering rare personal information.

"Where are you from then?" Akihito asks while obsessively chalking his cue. They're going to have to pick a different game. Snooker's one-sided with Wei.

"You really shouldn't do that," Wei takes his hand - it's Friday again, somehow Wei's wrangled an entire shift from Xiaohai - and blows the blue dust off of Akihito's fingers. "You'll stain the table blue."

Wei leans down - he's a head taller, easily - and sucks the tip of Akihito's ring finger into his mouth, laves over the bottom of it; when he lets the finger go he licks a tongue up the side until he reaches the knuckle, dipping into the hollow there.

"You really shouldn't do that," Akihito echoes him, making no move to pull away. "It's probably dangerous to your health."

"I've no doubt it is," Wei turns Akihito's hand over, rubs his thumb confidently over a crease and places a kiss in the middle of his palm. "It'll probably kill me."

Akihito has never been looked at like - never quite like this. Wei's gaze is hunger, is predatory want, and Akihito hasn't ever been so desired. Feilong looks at him like a friend, and in bed, a toy; Yoh treats him like a child. Under Wei's gaze, backed up against a pool table, Akihito feels a thrilling fear akin to staring into the eyes of a wolf, as a lamb about to be devoured.

"Then why do it," he asks, clutches the hand that Wei's just freed into the labels of Wei's suit jacket, hovering between pushing him away and pulling him closer.

"Life is all about risk and reward, Aki." Wei cages Akihito by holding onto the edge of the table, presses against him so Akihito can feel how hard he is. "And for once I can't calculate if it's worth it. I can't help myself."

When Wei kisses him, Akihito opens his mouth and kisses him right back, just as wanting, just as hungry, teeth clacking together in haste. It tastes like curiosity, what would it be like to kiss someone who desires him this much, not as a plaything but as a lover. Akihito has never known he's this selfish - that he would risk a man's life for a whim, but he's having a lot of chances to learn about himself lately, and the kiss is good; it's hard and consuming and hot, ends in Akihito grinding his hips against Wei, trying desperately to stay quiet.

"Fuck," Wei says, pupils blown and hair mussed, the top button of his shirt popped clean off where Akihito's been pulling at his collar. His hands rests on Akihito's hips, stilling him. "If you keep doing that I won't be able to stop."

Wei looks dishevelled and real and most prominently, shocked, as though he can't believe this is happening to him, that the mask he wears is the only identity he knows and if Akihito tears it off he'd have nothing left. It's sobering, disembodied pain of which Akihito only feels vicariously.

 _He's mine,_ Akihito thinks _, no, I made him mine, and it was that easy._

"Walk me back to my room," Akihito wakes from his lust-filled haze - he doesn't know this man. Maybe he wants Wei, like how most people his age wants to take home someone from a club on Friday night. It's not enough.

"Is that an invitation?" Wei asks from a breath away.

"No." Akihito says, extricating himself, pulling Wei's hands away from his hips and yanking his own shirt out of his pants to make his hard-on less obvious. "I don't really want you to die."

"How magnanimous of you," says Wei, running a hand through his hair to pull his waves back in place. Wei wears his hair a little long, styled with care, and now his bangs won't stay up. It's not an uncommon look, most people around here don't put too much stock in good hair, but Wei's usually so well put together that it stands out on him.

There's a Chinese concept Akihito has learned in his lessons, called yuen, the chance for any one person to meet; specifically, the chance for any one person to meet another and have any sort of relationship being slim to none, and that every meeting is precious. People constantly miss each other like riding on separate escalators going different directions, parallel lines never crossing. The feelings he has for Yoh, that sweet, painful, wrenching heartache that makes every kiss a revelation, Wei probably has for him.

If Yoh does to him what Akihito just did to Wei, he knows he would shatter - it does not agree with his faith in himself, that at heart he's a good person, that he likes to help people and fix things. 

Maybe his help only extends to friends; and Wei is not a friend.

The walk back to his room is quiet. Neither of them has anything to say; Akihito wants most to apologise, but he can't find the words, never having taken advantage of someone like this, to feel so damn guilty he could bury himself.

The he's closing the door to his room, Wei fits a foot in the gap, keeping it open, "Wait."

"Not a good idea," Akihito looks up at him, wishing to put the door in between them as soon as possible.

"Do you want to go home?" Wei asks, one hand braced against the door. "To Japan?"

Akihito feels greedy, the way he's never allowed himself to be - as though the months spent with Feilong spoiling him has spoilt him. As a child he'd wanted very little, told his parents he was fine whenever asked, threw their rare moments of affection back with cold indifference. But Feilong's never rejected him, never gone away without telling him when he'd be back; and Akihito wants to be in Japan, and he wants Feilong and Yoh with him always, wants to spend time with Tao, wants pub nights with Takato and Kou, wants his life back.

Akihito wants everything, including the mutually exclusive, wants the impossible, "Yes. Of course."

The lights in his room are still off. All he has is the night view from his floor to ceiling windows, the edges of his room falling into the city below. The hallway is lit in harsh green fluorescent glare; he cannot see Wei's face, back-lit and inscrutable in the negative space of his doorway.

He can't see it, but he knows he wants to run.

"Will you come down to the rec room tomorrow?" Wei asks.

Akihito smiles, keeping it light, keeping it - manageable. "Yeah. I'll see you around."

He does see Wei around. There are other guys to play cards with, to play darts with - everyone remarking on Akihito's improvement. Wei and Akihito barely say hi to each other, both acting like the night before never happened so convincingly that Akihito half thinks he may have dreamt it.

The third Friday comes around, and Akihito keeps mental track: three more days. He doesn't miss Feilong like one would a lover. He misses being fussed over, the easy intimacy he's cultivated with Feilong, someone he can lean on when he feels needy. So on that Friday he's all wound up and ready to spring from dumb anticipation and really not ready for Wei ambushing him in the empty rec room.

"Run away with me," Wei says, like it's easy.

He's back to his charming, perfectly put together, perfectly composed self - model good looks and solid muscles underneath the suit and nothing Akihito wants.

Some people believe in love at first sight, but Akihito doesn't think his heart works that way - it takes time to learn the borders of someone, to know their rivers and mountains and learn the lay of the land until it feels like home. Maybe if Wei had given him time - no, if Wei would tell Akihito where he's from, what his parents are like, how he spent his childhood, if he's ever had his heart broken - then Akihito could feel for him as anything more than a paper cut-out.

He should say no. But Akihito is young and hasn't any idea how cruel he can be, still learning his own sharp edges; those who want to learn it with him will just have to come away bloody.

Akihito surprises himself, "And then what?"

"I have friends who can get us to Taiwan - Baishe doesn't have a foothold there. Then we can board a plane to Tokyo." Wei's eyes are shining, and Akihito knows exactly what he looks like from the inside out - like the world's shimmering and everything glows.

Love's not a time to make major life decisions.

"And you think you can get away from Baishe?" Akihito asks, and he must have looked incredulous, because Wei's eyes flashes, desperate. Underneath, he must be jumping out of his skin, scattered, nervous energy so close to the surface even Akihito can read him.

"Please," Wei grabs at Akihito's hand, holds it in both of his, and the calm and cool Akihito remembers from the first day they met has slipped like so much sand. "I'll protect you. I can make sure nothing happens to you. Please."

Akihito knows, trusts with all his heart, that Feilong wouldn't let anything happen to him. He doesn't need anything from Wei, not his declarations of devotion or his pointless guarantees, but he lets Wei kiss him when he cups Akihito's cheek with one hand and bents his head down to seal the deal.

"What's your plan?" Akihito asks.

"I traded for the 1am shift on Monday night, just after Feilong comes back."

Akihito thinks for a minute, "Wouldn't it be easier to go before he comes back?"

"He's coming back by helicopter at 9, with only three of his men. Meanwhile, the temp staff here's being sent back to their home cities as soon as he gets back," Wei says, laying out what sounds like a decent plan. "The team Feilong took with him comes back by ferry at 2 in the morning. For about an hour the building will be understaffed."

"How did you know all this?" Akihito asks.

Wei just smiles, cryptic to the end.

"What if I can't slip away by 1am? What if Feilong's awake?" Akihito asks,  _or he's fucking me into the mattress by that time_ , a likely possibility after nearly four weeks apart. "What then?"

"He will be asleep," Wei slips a tiny package into Akihito's hand - a small blister pack with four green pills. "Steep that in with the tea."

"What, all of them?" Akihito stares at the pills like they're crawling insects.

"Feilong's going to take a sip at most. He'll notice it's bitter and blame it on the tea, but he's not going to drink it all," Wei says, squeezing Akihito's hand; Akihito's not sure whose hand is moist but it sticks to him like flypaper.

There are cold vines creeping up from his toes all the way up to his ears, a dreadful bespoken sort of sick. For what it's worth, that feeling erases all of his latent guilt, and drowns it in an unnamable slow-simmer rage.

You don't end up in Juvie repeatedly by mixing with the right people, and Akihito's been mixed up with the wrong kinds of people for years, had fistfights, passed fake bills and scammed men into giving up their credit cards. You don't end up in Juvie without meeting a few confidence men, either.

Rule number one with con men - never assume you're too smart to be conned. Rule number two: when you're part of a con, never assume you're not the victim. Rule number three: when something seems too good to be true - it is. Listen to your instincts.

Akihito's instincts are going haywire.

Wei must see the change, because he asks, "What's wrong?"

"Nothing," Akihito says, stuffing the pills into his pants pocket.

Akihito runs through fifteen scenarios in his head. None of them are good.

At Akihito's door, Wei is pushy, kissing him rough against the door frame. It's nearly midnight and Akihito thinks of how Yoh could have him any time he wanted, this floor's always deserted after 10 - and he pushes Wei away.

"Later," Akihito says, but he's holding on tight still, too close for Wei to focus on. He's not a very good liar, never did learn the knack of looking into someone's eyes and sprouting falsehoods in their face. Now he buries his cheek into the line of Wei's neck, where the pulse runs multiple exposure flash speed burning afterimages of Wei's expression - close-up and flushed, near-midnight shadow stubble, lips kiss stung - into Akihito's long term memory.

Akihito looks up, thinks he can lie after all if he doesn't give a shit about someone, "Later, when we're out of here, and no one can interrupt us."

The pills in its blister pack Akihito hides under his mattress; whatever is left of the guilt he doesn't know what to do with.

He spends the next two evenings in his room, hiding, reading the photography magazines Wei gave him, circling the and lenses and accessories he wants to eventually own.

Avoidance is easy. Akihito avoiding the decision of putting Wei's life in his hands for days.

He should tell Wei no, pull him into a stairwell and kiss him off goodbye forever. It's the right thing to do - but he's in too deep now, that niggling seed of doubt that's gone full flower since he met Wei has to be dealt with first.

Wei is too much. He's too handsome, too suave, too well-educated, too - oh bloody hell - too perfect. There are holes in his ears that used to be earrings, a mark on his finger that might have been a ring, no callous at all on his trigger finger. He speaks in stilted Cantonese that even Akihito can tell is stilted, his perfect Tokyo speech is spoken at such breakneck speed that he's a genius if he learned to do that in four years; he has too many secrets, too many evaded questions, and Akihito has too many suspicions to let him go, to leave him unscathed.

As his thoughts focus on the little packet of pills he's been given, Akihito makes up his mind. And to his terrified conscience, he's not sure if he cares whether or not Wei's affections are real.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next: the men in Akihito's life comes home.
> 
> *
> 
> This is the theme song I worked off of when I created Wei:  
> https://youtu.be/wdypZWuoKvQ  
> The lyrics don't matter, in this case.  
> And his looks are based on Zhao Lei in a suit. Because Zhao Lei is a suit is the most handsome man alive.
> 
> btw, Yoh is written as 葉 and means leaf, which really should be pronounced as Yip (Cantonese) or Ye (Mandarin) but the kana says Yoh so. I was expecting something more meaningful when I went to dig up the Japanese raws the first time... but no it just means leaf. Or vegetation. Even better.
> 
> metro-Tokyo Japanese - this is entirely anecdotal of me, but istg they speak faster in Tokyo than anywhere else.
> 
> *  
> see you next friday.


	4. 白酒 (Baijiu)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> 白酒 : Baijiu : "White spirit," stronger than vodka and tastes like death.

Akihito is sleep deprived and jittery with too much caffeine by the time Feilong lands, clockwork to the 9pm Wei said he would. Before the rotors even stop turning, Akihito's running into Feilong's open arms, his raw nerves a mess of junks seeking safety in a typhoon shelter.

"Did you miss me that much?" Feilong smiles into the top of Akihito's head, kisses the whorl of his blond hair. "I'm sorry I didn't come back every night."

"Did you want to?" Akihito says into Feilong's chest, heart slowing to a manageable rhythm by virtue of being there, timing itself to another. "Could you have?"

Yoh steps off the helicopter behind Feilong and Akihito doesn't risk a glance. He will be ready for that talk in about five minutes - not now. They start for the elevator, as more men disembark behind.

"I was in the lift the first night going to the helipad - but a business associate commented on how I must have a lover I wanted to run back home to every night," Feilong says, one arm around Akihito's shoulders holding him close. "Honestly, you being talked about is the last thing I need."

Stupidly - and Akihito knows it as soon as the question's out of his mouth, he asks why.

"Baishe has a lot of enemies," Yoh says, looking worried and about as sleep-deprived as Akihito feels. "If they know about you ... "

"Oh," Akihito says, and all his theories and suspicion develops sharp edges and details, ready for the fixer. Throwing on his best poker face, he says, "You both look so tired."

"I'm exhausted," Feilong leans into Akihito's shoulder, awkward in their height difference and to Akihito it's cute as anything, even under his nervous spell. "I'm going to take a nap - so I don't fall asleep on you later."

It's ludicrous to be shy at this point, but Akihito blushes, steals a glance at Yoh behind them who's alternating between finding the elevator ceiling interesting and checking his phone; Akihito settles for elbowing Feilong in the ribs for that bit of indignity. As soon as the elevator door closes, Feilong off to his aforementioned nap on his floor, Akihito breaks out in a cold sweat.

If he waits any longer he'd back out of all this; when Akihito's about to speak, Yoh claps a hand over his mouth and draws him back against his wide chest. "Shh," Yoh keys in the code for his own apartment floor. "I need you to be quiet," he mouths the words next to Akihito's ear lower than a whisper and doesn't wait for him to nod his assent; Yoh expects it, drops his hand to Akihito's shoulder, holding him close.

If anyone is watching, they must think Yoh is taking Akihito down to his room for anything but a talk - then the gears in his head finishes spinning and Akihito gets it. For confirmation sake, he turns to Yoh, getting a hard squeeze to the shoulder.

"Don't look up,"  Yoh says right near Akihito's ear, terribly unmindful of his cardiovascular health. "You're far too easy to read."

Akihito stays quiet right up until Yoh pushes him past the bathroom door and doesn't tell him to take a shower, just turns it on, stands there in the bathroom waiting for him to take off his clothes. "Why," he mouths.

Yoh leans in again, "Go in with all your clothes on if you must."

At which point Akihito decides that it's useless to be shy and strips. His clothes are quickly picked up and just as quickly tossed outside the bathroom, Yoh closing the door behind them.

Yoh turns on the bathroom fan and lights up a smoke, "We noticed you were spooked when we were still in the air. Spill."

Akihito's not going to deny that he practically stood on that roof with a placard that says 'help me,' he's barely slept, the shower's actually helping.

"Why all the - " Akihito points at the shower, points at the door, doesn't even know what to say about all the secrecy.

"Someone bugged the elevator," Yoh pays no mind to Akihito, shower curtain half open and water getting all over his floor. "I figured someone might have also bugged you. Give me a name, Akihito."

Akihito doesn't have enough information; maybe he can still get out of this, he thinks, maybe he's made a leap of logic too far and Wei is simply a flirt and he can push the facts away so no one will get hurt, "Are you going to kill him?"

"That is not up to me," says Yoh.

"I'll tell you if you promise to ... not tell Feilong," Akihito says, clutching at straws since that's all he has. "Maybe it has nothing to do with him."

"You can't know that," Yoh narrows eyes at Akihito, "And I can't not tell my boss."

He can't expect more; Yoh is obedient to a fault when it comes to Feilong, even when Feilong's capricious and decides to take them all out on a trip without additional bodyguards, "What if - what if you check it out first? Without telling him? And then only tell him if it concerns him?"

Yoh takes so long answering him that Akihito's expecting a rebuke, for Yoh to tell him that the organization is his priority and not Akihito's whims in protecting a traitor. His cigarette's smoked down to the filter before he speaks again; the sound of the shower running endlessly doesn't drown out the jumbled bloodied images of Wei in Akihito's head. "No, But I can give you my word that if - and it's a big if - his only target is you, only you, and not some ploy to get at Feilong, we're not going to hurt him."

"Thank you," Akihito slumps against the bathroom wall, breath that's been running a marathon since he's been on the roof finally starts to slow down. "He goes by 'Wei.' Xiaohai - the guard you assigned - can find him for you."

Yoh gives him the oddest look, like Akihito's grown horns, and dials a number on his phone, "Really."

The Plan never would have worked. Even if Akihito did fall in love with Wei - which he could not, and even if Akihito decided to run away, that it's worth the fallout, he has nothing in the artifice department and can't lie for shit in front of people he cares about.

It's his greatest fault and his greatest asset, the yin yang that forms the basis of all his friendships, why people who are constant in their distrust place their trust in him, why Feilong sleeps like a baby by his side.

"Akihito," Yoh finishes talking on the phone and turns his full attention on him. "Is Wei infatuated with you?"

"Um," Akihito colours.

Which is answer enough for Yoh, "I'm going to ask you this only once: do you want to hide here, or do you want to see this through?"

* * *

The Baishe building has a sub-basement pool and a gym because they haven't branched into the extortionist business of membership based gyms and Feilong needs a place to spar in - toss his underlings around like marionettes - first thing every morning. It also has its own shooting range, and a conveniently located shower room that nobody ever uses for showers, on account of the everpresent, overwhelming smell of bleach. It is by no means dark and ominous like those warehouses the yakuza likes to keep on the waterfront in Tokyo; the shower room is pristine, recessed fluorescent lamps bright overhead, and the only indication that it's ever used at all for anything untoward is the trolley Feilong's dragging in with him.

Wei has his arms crossed and chained to a shower head and his ankles chained to a length of pipe. It looks like overkill, but Wei's the kind of man you find standing in a pool of blood and dead bodies in rival territory after walking in with his hands cuffed behind his back. Feilong isn't about to take any chances.

He's also as flippant as Feilong remembers, "What is this, Feilong?"

"This is me giving you a chance to come clean," Feilong steps closer - but just out of biting range.

Wei's not the type to tack on honorifics or show respect - not unless it serves, and it apparently doesn't serve him to do so now. "You tased me."

"I asked Yoh to bring you in without causing a commotion," Feilong pushes the trolley so it's a shadow behind him, not like Wei's paying attention to it at all. "Imagine everyone thinking you a traitor if our information turns out to be wrong."

"It's wrong," says Wei brightly with a 100-watt smile.

Feilong tries a friendlier tone, "It comes from a reliable source. The truth. Please - for old time's sake."

"Old times. Right," Wei rolls his head in a half shake, half nod, "I spent most of our old times watching you learn how to slit throats. And then I spent most of the time after that watching you slit throats. I'll stick to my story, thanks."

"You weren't supposed to be here. I didn't send for you," Feilong says. There's no Wei on the list of personnel sent from Xiamen, but Wei gets around; he goes where he's needed. 

"I got bored in the boonies. So I traded with a colleague for the spot. Just a bit of fun - that's not against our oath, is it?" Wei asks, his half-smile and thousand yard stare in full effect.

Feilong wonders if Akihito ever got a good look at Wei with the charm turned off. The boy would have run for the hills - probably jump right back into Kowloon Bay for Narita, whether it's a four hour flight or sixteen. Feilong used to be afraid of it, the little half-grin, half-sneer Wei wears while someone's life leaked from between his fingers, perfect serenity in the face of death.

"I don't get it," Feilong says, but he has all the answers already, because they are obvious - but there's no proof, none except Akihito's word. "Why betray us now?"

"I would never betray Baishe. You know that. So untie me and I'll," Wei cracks his neck, the click of it unsettling in the echo, "forget this ever happened."

"I wonder which of my family you're working for," Feilong pretends to ponder, walks a half circle until he's behind the cart. "You've always been crazy - but predictably loyal. You've never disobeyed an order from my father, nor my brother - nor me, in the past four years."

"Oh, Feilong. We're all crazy here," Wei grins, all teeth. "By any definition of normal that involves you know, not committing murder on a weekly basis."

Feilong elects to ignore that, though it is very tempting to remind Wei that he used to get up to things that had the newspaper speculating on a new resident serial killer in Hong Kong, "Xiamen is awfully close to Taiwan."

"If you're testing me on geography, I must remind you that I majored in English Lit," says Wei.

It's not like Feilong's the one that sent Wei away for that useless degree, but Wei's carried a passing fish gall bladder resentment about it, bitter bile seeping into the rest of his flesh. His brother's the one that wanted Feilong to work alone without relying on a veteran in the hopes of getting him killed so he didn't have to look at Feilong and live with his lust.

"It's a teachable. You can't teach English in Japan without already having a teachable," Feilong points out, which only seems to make Wei more irate - exactly what he's looking for.

"I spent two years in Tokyo for you, Feilong. Two boring ass years," Wei says, seething in none of the muscles in his face but his eyes, aflame with rage. "And when you got out of jail, I came right back to you. How do you figure me a traitor?"

Nothing but Akihito's word keeps him here. Wei's good - it's his job to take care of security and cover Feilong in his earlier years, and there are no blanks in the security footage, no straight up-erasures and obvious cuts, just loops of empty idle time. Feilong can only hope to read between Wei's lies to get at something like a motivation, to get closer to the truth he already suspects.

Cell phones don't work in the basement by design so Feilong pulls out a walkie-talkie, "Bring Akihito down here."

Wei snorts, "I know exactly what you're up to."

"And what am I up to?" Asks Feilong.

"I've stood exactly where you're standing - what will you do? Fuck him in front of me? We both know you're not really going to hurt him," Wei rolls his eyes.

"You make it sound like you know me," Feilong blinks up at him. "I assure you that you do not."

Wei's bound up Feilong's cuts for him when he was just thirteen, having caught his arm on broken glass getting out of a second story window, helped him hide it from Yantsui. At the time Feilong assumed it's a favour given, a returning favour expected, but it still felt like kindness. 

"You were always a bit soft. Headstrong, reckless," Wei settles into a lopsided smile and taunts. "Daddy's little pup."

"I see you've dropped all pretense of deference," Feilong scoffs, tips his head slightly to one side. "Don't plan on working for me anymore after this?"

"I'm not like your other ... prisoners. I know how many people walk out of this room alive," Wei rattles the chain, knowing full well that there's no give. "So either you get nothing out of me, and shoot me, or, you get something out of me, and shoot me. Or -"

Enough time has passed for Yoh to arrive, dragging Akihito behind him - handcuffed, duct-tape over his mouth and blindfolded, interrupting Wei's little monologue. Wei's expression goes completely placid, entirely without emotion, not a single tight muscle in his brow.

"You don't think I'd hurt him," Feilong turns to Yoh. "Just hang him over there."

Yoh does, takes Akihito's cuff chain and stretches it over a showerhead, and he's short enough that his toes just reach the floor.

"Hurt him, and you destroy the only person who'd ever understand you," Wei is contemptuous mocking as he continues, turning down the volume to get so loud it rings, "Hurt him and you'll be all alone."

"I see," says Feilong, expression not changing one bit, matching Wei's poker face perfectly - they were trained by the same people, after all. "Yoh, shoot Akihito in the stomach. Do try not to miss."

Yoh looks for a second entirely scandalised - as if he'd miss - then he takes seconds fitting on a suppressor and barely takes the time to aim before he pulls the trigger. It's quiet, just the tiny whip of a bullet whistling through the air, but Akihito's knocked back against the pipe behind him and his shirt seeps with red immediately.

That blank-eyed stare of Wei's says everything.

"Still think I won't hurt him?" Feilong feels hollowed out; maybe it's the shower room echo, but he swears there's an emptiness he doesn't even have to put on for Wei. 

"Hah," Wei says, devolving quickly into staccato hysterical laughter within seconds, his features twisting into a vicious grimace Feilong's never seen on him in the twenty years he's known Wei - from the street urchin Baishe plucked off the streets of Xiamen to whatever monster they groomed him to be. "I'm feeling ... quite sorry for you."

"Oh?" Feilong crosses his arms and waits. "How so?"

"He's innocent, you know," the corner of Wei's mouth twitches in the imitation of a smile that doesn't quite catch, over - and over. "Never said a word about you. Got all concerned over a bit of soporific. He never would have - hah," Wei laighs, not so much angry as annoyed, "What the fuck did you do that for?"

"Maybe I'll shoot you too," Feilong makes a show of pondering, "and just leave you both here. You can stare at him until he stops breathing. May take a day. Or two."

"I should have taken him away while you were gone," Wei is as close to heated rage as he can get, fingers twisted up above his head, his entire body straining forward as if he wants to bite off Feilong's nose.

Out of all the years of his life Feilong wonders if Wei has ever lost his temper; and if he has, had he any way to control it other than a bloodbath. It can only mean that he's choking on all that anger, tied to a pole. It's not ideal, but definitely usable.

"Why didn't you?" Akihito isn't moving, seems to have passed out, so Feilong takes the few steps over and smacks his cheeks a couple of times until Akihito's shaking his head, making choked crying sounds behind the tape. "You had many chances. So, why didn't you?"

Wei licks his lips, stares at Feilong like he would a dead body, "That's the million dollar question isn't it."

"Someone asked you to kidnap him," Feilong strokes a gentle finger down Akihito's cheek. "And you got attached."

"Are we talking about me, or you?" Wei's always been the quicker one, whatever Feilong's planning, Wei has a hundred scenarios all checked and double-checked and zeroing in on one. "You see his pretty eyes all glossy when he looks at you, and he knows you're a killer and he's not afraid. He goes to your bed and coos in your ear and he falls asleep in your arms - he must be irreplaceable."

"Is he now?" Feilong moves to Wei, close enough to risk being spat upon.

"Your sweet Aki has a thing for murderers. There are pictures - of his little outings. With Yoh there," Wei's going for full charm, which Feilong knows better than to buy, his eyes has that hypnotic twinkle and his face has moved muscle by muscle into a winsome grin. "He looks at that monster you keep around like he's the world. It's not like he doesn't know what Yoh is. He loves him because he knows. Wouldn't you want him to look at you like that? Maybe he will - give him another few months, keep him chained to your bedside, let him know nothing else but you. He will ... love you. He doesn't know how else to be."

"You didn't want to give him up," Feilong says simply, thinks he has Wei puzzled out. "You had to give your employer something better. Something like me."

Wei doesn't say anything, tips his head back and stares down at Feilong through his lashes. It certainly looks as though Feilong has gotten too close to the truth.

"You want me to keep Akihito alive - you may be good at lying but I know all your tells, I can see that you _care_ ; you don't want to give him up, and you wanted to wait until I came back. You are perfectly capable of killing me - you know me well enough that I'd let my guard down around you. The only person who'd want me delivered to them alive is Yantsui."

The name drops soft like a pin; the silence after feels unending.

"You've gotten a lot better at this," Wei acknowledges, dry, his expression back to perfectly neutral.

"Only because I have to be." Feilong sighs dramatically, "It's only going to be harder without you."

Wei smiles, fully convincingly serene, "Excuse me for not losing any sleep on your behalf."

"I'm really tempted to shoot you now, but I'm feeling rather generous." Feilong holds a hand out to Yoh, and a key lands in his palm a second after. It's quick work to get Akihito off of the shower head after that, the boy rubbing at his wrists and rolling his shoulders because they must almost dislocate under the strain of his weight pulling him down like a sack of flour.

Feilong's never done this before, wasn't even sure if it'd work, but Yoh's good at coming up with stuff like this on the fly: an ultrathin kevlar vest, a bag of blood, and a blank bullet. He's only mildly insulted when Yoh insisted on doing the actual shooting, because missing could have meant Akihito's life.

The tape and the blindfold goes next, and Akihito seems fine aside from some stretched muscles likely burning on his back.

Wei's laughing and shaking his head - the quiet, relieved sound of the closest thing to resignation as he gets, "I should have known. You only covered his eyes like that because he's a shit actor."

At his post with his back to the door, Yoh huffs out a chuckle.

Blanks still hurt, and Akihito must be black and blue under the ves; Feilong wants to pull off everything to check him. But Akihito's looking at Wei with concern, and of course he would; Akihito would throw himself in front of bullets for strangers and Wei isn't a stranger any more.

"I'll have to kill him," Feilong says, heading off any pleading in advance.

"But -" Akihito begins, but Wei's the one to cut him off.

"I blew my cover, Aki," at least Wei isn't using whatever time he has on this earth to make the kid feel guilty. "If I don't die here, my employer will find me and torture me for everything I know about this building - the security flaws, so many, please fire your chief of security this place is swiss cheese - and then I'll die anyway."

"Can't you stay here?" Akihito turns from Wei to Feilong, "Can't you keep him?"

Feilong knows this is why he keeps Akihito in his bed every night, and this is why Feilong isn't riddled with more bullet wounds, and this is why Yoh treats Akihito delicately, handles him like fine China when his hands spend most evenings breaking necks. Akihito has to know that dodging a bullet doesn't mean his enemy's magazine is empty.

"He's not a stray dog," Feilong holds Akihito tight, works his knuckles into the sore spots on his back, and tries to ignore his tears that are all but inevitable. "He's a viper."

Wei's hardly worth his tears, he's trailed by a whole river of blood, but none of them are innocent here save Akihito so Feilong can only dab at Akihito's eyes with his thumbs when the boy begs, "But he tried to - save me."

There's no denying that and no amount of comforting is going to help; Feilong is drawing a blank. Yoh decides to rescue him, cutting in, "So what? So you should try to save him?"

Akihito stammers, "I - want to save him."

Yoh nods, approving, but he plows on. "And if that comes at the cost of Feilong's life - maybe not today, but next week? Next month? Whose life is more important to you?"

"You can't lay this on him, Yoh," Feilong says, feeling every bit like an overprotective brother before Yoh shoots him a look: he knows what he's doing - don't interfere.

"You knew what he was the moment you laid eyes on him," Yoh's saying, and to Feilong's surprise, Akihito nods, biting his lip. "And when he tried to get close, you let him."

"I didn't have much of a choice," Akihito sparks angry at what Yoh's implying.

"You could have run away. You know full well that I would have flown right back here if you did," Yoh had warned him before they left for Macau.

"I -" Akihito's at a loss for words, scrabbling at half-truths. "I didn't want to be any trouble."

"Bullshit. You thought you didn't need any help," Yoh lets a wild edge of anger leak into his voice, the final effect derisive. "You're tired of being protected and treated like a child - so you sacrificed Wei for your ego."

Akihito backs up a step, but to his credit, he doesn't run away; when cornered, he spits fire, "Fine. You're right. I didn't want any help."

"You did the right thing," and to everyone's surprise, Yoh clasps Akihito on the shoulder the way he would a colleague - an equal.

Akihito looks up to meet Yoh for the first time since he's been addressed. "I did?"

"If I'd come back then he would have disappeared back into the woodwork. We'd still have a high ranking traitor in the organization," Yoh looks pointedly at Wei. "If you'd dodged him, didn't allow him to get close - he'd have knocked you out one night and taken you by force."

Wei chooses that moment to interject, grinning, "That was Plan A."

"He is a danger to us," Yoh ignores him, keeps his hand firm on Akihito. "The moment he gave you those pills, he sealed his fate. He overreached and made a choice - he chose to save your life over his. But that is his decision, not yours."

"But I feel responsible," Akihito fists his hands at his sides.

"You are responsible for flushing him out," Yoh shifts his attention so Akihito has to feel the full weight of it, piercing, sees right through him. "You are not responsible for his betrayal."

"Right," Akihito straightens out his back, "I don't like it. But I get it."

"No one is asking you to like it," says Yoh, leaving it at that.

Feilong doesn't like it either; Wei's never really been much of a friend, but he's history same as Feilong's venomous brother and the cold wall he remembers of his late father, rips and tears in the tapestry of his life he's chosen not to mend. But he's the boss now, no one's here to ask him how he feels, and the silencer snapping to his gun with a satisfying click doesn't care either.

How Yoh's handled Akihito has been masterful, something Feilong's not capable of, maybe explains why Akihito's head over heels for him. Still, Feilong wishes to shield Akihito - from everything.

"Get Akihito upstairs," Feilong orders. "And call the cleaners."

"I'm not leaving," of course, Akihito is choosing now to be stubborn.

Feilong killed his first man on his twelfth birthday: piano wire to the neck, arterial spray across his mouth, getting into his eyes. He had nightmares for weeks of white linens and red blood seeping an endless stretch, how the colour tended to follow the seams.

It wasn't anyone important - he can't even remember the layout of the mansion of that first hit job. It was no one he knew. It haunted him for literally years, until one job bled into another and he couldn't tell which nightmare belonged to which murder any longer.

"You don't need to prove yourself. We're not going to think any less of you," Feilong thinks he's doing Akihito a favour, gets a scathing look of fury in return.

"I couldn't care less what you think of me," Akihito says, defiantly jutting out his chin.

"Let him stay," Yoh pats Akihito on the back. "He can handle it."

Feilong bites back  _he's just a child_ , because wow that would have totally backfired, but he does give Yoh the most incredulous stare, "Are you serious?"

"I'd put the gun in his hand if he knows how to use one," Yoh has his hand planted on Akihito's back, must notice the slight buckling of his knees. "He's an adult. Let him make his own decisions."

Feilong doesn't know why anyone would choose to have nightmares, but what may be harder for Akihito is something he feels responsible for happening out of sight, the darkness of not knowing. Feilong's never been given much of a choice himself, just what Asami knew him to be - a puppet. He's long lost his strings; would he attach them to Akihito and steer him away from Feilong's abyss, with or without his consent?

"Fine," whether or not he agrees doesn't matter. Just like how Yoh's put it - they can't keep treating Akihito like a doll.

Akihito regards him hopefully, and he looks more grown-up somehow; it feels a little lonely, "Can I talk to him?"

Wei's hair is in his eyes and his skin's covered in a sheen of sweat, but he's pulling on his deepest reserves to gloss over all his imperfections with charm, "Hello, Aki."

"Don't get too close," Feilong warns.

Akihito immediately steps far too close for Feilong's liking, close enough for Wei to tear a chunk out of him; he lays his head over Wei's heart, where the rhythm has to be steady and constant and doesn't betray at hint of terror at imminent death - and clenches his hands into the lapels of his jacket, crushing the fabric.

"I'm sorry," Akihito says, as Wei bends down to press a kiss on his head, and he chances a glance up at Wei with fearless eyes.

"Whatever for," Wei chuckles soft over him, moves Akihito's hair with his breath. "This is all on me."

Akihito strains harder into his chest, "I'm sorry anyway."

Wei rests his chin on him, like his arm's just resting out of reach and not chained to metal overhead, "Take a word of advice from a dying man?"

Akihito pulls back enough to focus on him, meets him square in the eyes afraid to miss the space of a blink. "Okay."

"If you want something, take it. Life's too short," Wei is all the confidence Akihito saw on that first day they met.

"Even if -" Akihito isn't given a chance to finish.

" _Especially_  if it kills you," Wei's last smile is bright with raised eyebrows, clear and open - what hides beneath.

* * *

Yoh brings them a dark orange red bottle of something that smells like kerosene made out of rice, and the stink of it overwhelms everything, including the antiseptic and bleach stench in that shower room, like a pool in a hospital, that Akihito swears clings to him even after Yoh had patiently washed out his hair.

Akihito's clung onto Wei until he's dragged away, searching in vain for a heartbeat.

"What is that," Akihito makes a face over the tiny cup of white liquor Feilong's poured for him. How odd - Feilong's the one serving him, when usually Akihito has to pour the drinks. "It smells like you can light it on fire."

"You probably can," Feilong's smiling at him as though the day's events were only a dream. "Don't try to knock it back. Sip it."

It is the most disgusting thing Akihito has ever imbibed, like sweetened month-old rice mashed with vodka, and as he drinks it a line of fire burns all the way down from his tongue to his stomach.

"That is," he doesn't mean to be rude but there's really no other way to put it, "the most disgusting alcohol I've ever had."

"Is it the worst thing that happened to you today?" Feilong asks, sipping his own cup of liquid fire and looking out into the night.

Akihito can't answer that without crying again, so he laughs. He ends up wiping tears away regardless, "But why this stuff? It's gross - the aftertaste is foul."

"It's called Baijiu. Sort of like ... a national liquor. Vodka is to Russia what Baijiu is to China," Feilong is draped over his chair in the torpor of very hard booze. "My brother gave me a bottle when I killed the first time."

The words are a tremor, how a summer typhoon wave shakes a building, winds lashing so hard at concrete it sways. Akihito is a runner; he's run from his feelings and his sexuality and his abandonment issues by acting out and getting caught over and over, anything to keep his parents in the country. Neither Feilong nor Yoh gives him room to run. But Feilong says it with reflection and reminisce and no judgement - the rough truth of it a comforting shared shape between them. His cup is refilled: here's another to burn away your sins.

Akihito remembers a distortion like an old cassette player running low on battery, steady rhythm slowing to a trickle, to a stop, waiting for the next beat and hearing - nothing.

"I killed him," he says aloud, more foreign than any new language.

Wei was a puzzle box, full of strange slides and hidden plates, invited him to pull and push and dismantle piece by piece. When the last piece falls away Akihito finds his own cruelty and he can only wonder at it, astonished and aghast at its existence.

"You probably saved my life," Feilong says, reaches over to brush fingers over Akihito's arm. "Again."

"Oh?" His head is foggy, fatigue and loss and drink.

"Yantsui is my brother. Wei worked for him. I guess I was naive to think that just because I'm the head of Baishe now, he'd be loyal to me," Feilong says, and Akihito's not sure if it's the Baijiu that drags out the core of Feilong, turns him inside out bloody for Akihito to see, but there's a look in his eyes Akihito hasn't seen since they slept together the first time; the day Feilong showed Akihito their matching scars.

"Your brother wants you dead?" Akihito says, looks truly confounded.

"Oh, not dead. Nothing so ... plebeian. Yantsui is nothing if not predictable," Feilong says, countenance darkening at the mention of his name. "He was probably planning to hold you prisoner, make me go get you - alone - just to rape me in front of you. And  _then_  he'll kill us both. Probably."

"That's messed up," Akihito says, once he stops gaping at Feilong like a fish. "He'd do that to his own brother?"

"What, rape me? He's tried," Feilong grins, but it doesn't reach his eyes - he can't find the good memories, only ones that hurt; same as the last time he had talked about his family, pain etched in his brows. "I had a gun, though. My father kicked me out of the house for that. For pulling a gun on Yantsui."

"That is so unfair!" Akihito is past caring about how juvenile that makes him sound.

Feilong laughs, eyes squinted to lines and tossing his head back - when was the last time he laughed like this? Has he ever? It is such an Akihito thing to say, to be so outraged on his behalf. "My thoughts at the time exactly."

That he's ever thought of life having a concept like fairness is a wonder - how Akihito digs up the remnants of his child-like thoughts, a mystery. Feilong doesn't drink usually, he's too easily incapacitated for it to be a regular vice, but this is how safe he feels around Akihito.

"When I was 12 years old," Feilong tells him, as he's never told anyone - not even the man he had called father. "My brother asked me to seduce a man - so I could easily kill him."

Takaba Akihito is twenty years old, in a strange country learning to speak a new language; he spends most weekends prowling the streets of Hong Kong with a triad hit man and a boy that fits in about as well as Akihito does, and he's just killed the first person to ever fall in love - obsessed, as interested as Wei can be - with him. He's also getting shitfaced on baijiu while sharing childhood secrets with a triad Dragon Head in  a through the looking glass version of a slumber party.

In the grey dawn haze of morning, when the deep jewel blue of night fades into blinding light, Akihito, whining with a splitting hangover only baijiu can give, will remember every word he shared with Feilong the night before; remember Yoh telling him he's an adult and can make his own decisions; remember Feilong's naked vulnerability as his tears wet the thin silk fabric of Akihito's shirt, his own tears running over the bridge of his nose and into the pillows piled high beneath them.

* * *

Akihito thinks of Wei every morning he wakes, for a time, but not as he suspects he would, of the moment of his death.

He has early morning dreams of a single red rose blooming in the distance in a field of pinkish white flowers, that one rose colouring the rest petal by petal unhurried, a line of red stretching to his feet. Wei's last words follow Akihito through breakfast. If Yoh noticed how quiet Akihito's become each morning, he makes no mention of it.

When the evening light is of a sharp enough quality to cut through smog, refracting through his room casting harsh shadows, he would for a second catch a liminal figure in his doorway with fluorescent light bright and green behind him, and he'd freeze until it dissolves; other times he dreams of a kiss tasting of hunger, wet, needy, and nearly loving. Moments have been burnt into him forever, exaggerated by loss; a hot mouth on his fingers, eyes boring into him like a wolf's, a light laughing, sing-song voice speaking a pet name that irritates him in all the wrong ways: Aki.

They're not what anyone might call nightmares, he does not wake from these with a start, but with a slight twinge in his chest, something he tries hard to remember, yet begins to fade immediately on capture.

Wei quickly becomes a strip of negative Akihito keeps in the manilla folders of his life in an unused drawer; forever blown-out, overexposed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Coming up next: Asami makes his first appearance. (It's uphill from here. Fluff! Maybe a bit of angst but mostly fluff! Yay!)
> 
> on a side note, here's my fancast:  
> Asami Ryuichi - Kevin Yan Yi Kuan  
> Liu Feilong - Vin Zhang  
> Yoh - Andy Lau (from his 2003 days)
> 
> See you next Friday.


	5. 竹筍 (Zhusun)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> 竹筍 : zhusun : bamboo shoots. Bamboo tend to die all at once, and takes years to grow back.
> 
> In which Feilong faces himself, and reconnects with an old friend.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is set to the song [手心的蔷薇 The Rose in the Palm (link is to a MV and translation)](https://jspinyin.wordpress.com/2015/05/02/pinyinenglish-lyrics-jj-lin-%E6%9E%97%E4%BF%8A%E6%9D%B0-g-e-m-tang-%E9%82%93%E7%B4%AB%E6%A3%8B-beautiful-%E6%89%8B%E5%BF%83%E7%9A%84%E8%94%B7%E8%96%87-shou-xin-de-qiang-wei/)

Everything changes after Wei's departure.

Akihito only notices the surface details, af first. He gets two guards now, always a different pair, nameless mooks chosen carefully for their lack of communication skills and elevated levels of misanthropy just hitting the bar of not talking to each other ever. Yoh offers to teach Akihito how to use a gun and Akihito takes him up on the offer on entirely ulterior motives; Feilong doesn't offer so much as demands Akihito learn how to disarm an opponent with at least one limb tied behind his back, not to mention the many, many ways of getting out of a bind literally.

The chain is removed from the bed one day before he came back upstairs from afternoon target practice. Akihito is told he's granted free-roam of the building as long as he takes his silent shadows.

He insinuates himself into the kitchen staff and learns how to make Chinese food, hits the center of a target at 40 meters with Yoh's hands on Akihito's hip and shoulder to correct his posture, kicks a pistol out of Feilong's grip from a prone position and learns to get out of handcuffs with a paperclip, a pin, or a coffee straw. He fills his days with new experiences and Feilong, new experiences  _with_  Feilong, and it escapes his notice when twenty year old Akihito becomes overwritten with grey morality and nineteen year old Akihito metamorphoses into a faded, distant palimpsest.

It barely registered, what with his scheduled filling up to the brim, how much of a tether to the real world the chain was. Akihito has been hanging above the void by an ankle, and without it he falls completely.

* * *

Akihito doesn't try to run away anymore.

It's not the guards; Akihito can easily outrun the guards, and he knows they're not about to use lethal force, no matter what he does. Akihito will jump into an ocean without a thought to such things as risk assessment, but this isn't about just him anymore; he will not slip out of a building to risk Feilong's life, not after learning about the man Liu Yantsui and the amount of sick shit said man is capable of.

Once the splitting headache from the hell of his first Baijiu binge faded away, Akihito's pretty sure he's figured out the Gordian knot Feilong keeps inside his head. Feilong doesn't want to talk about it, guards it like the dragon of his namesake, distracts Akihito with sex and bats away attempts to unravel him. Akihito is unmindful of the darkness creeping up his arms as he digs, reaching into Feilong's chest full of secrets.

Over the days and weeks and months Akihito realises he can only ever walk in place. It's like dragging an anchor by his feet.

Akihito no longer has a chain he can feel and touch and test the weight of; the attachment easily formed between Feilong and himself has bound him more securely than anything.

* * *

On Christmas eve, Yoh comes into his room and confiscates all his dogeared copies of ASAHICAMERA and two unopened Nissin cup noodles in chicken flavour and the single pressed candy wrapper Akihito's hidden between the mattress and the box spring, telling him it's unhealthy. Akihito's refuses to acknowledge what he means, argues that the sodium content isn't all that bad and he's not planning on eating them anyway, but Yoh just ruffles Akihito's hair and surprises him with a hug that lasts too long, until he feels drunk on the touch, uncomfortably warm with the prickle of heat from Yoh's wool suit. Even then, Yoh holds him until his eyes are dry.

On Christmas day, Feilong surprises Akihito with everything he's circled in his stack of photography magazines. Akihito attaches the telephoto lens to his 35mm format and goes to the roof with a tripod, changes his mind once he gets there and tries the tilt-shift, turning Kowloon into a series of miniatures, little people, little stalls, surrounded by a vignette of faded dreams.

Akihito vaguely recalls that it's precisely what he wanted something like a lifetime ago, but he hasn't felt like the city's a monster for a good long time. Taking the pictures feels like fulfilling the obligation of an earlier incarnation, something that no longer has anything to do with him.

There's a strange hollowness to the new photographs he now takes that he does not remember with his father's old manual Canon; an aching sorrow only describable as a collapsed star - a black hole, a singularity around which his subjects revolve.

* * *

Since Feilong doesn't understand the term 'everything in moderation,' he takes Takihito and Tao to the Po Lin Monastery on New Year's Day for hatsumode - only the biggest temple in Hong Kong with the biggest bronze Buddha in all of known creation will do.

Po Lin is huge, nothing at all like a shrine, seems to Akihito to spread over half the mountain with its stone bridges and arches. He can't get away from all the red and gold, feels dizzy with the smoke from cones of incense hanging from the rafters, wonders how any monk can find serenity in this tourist trap. Instead of peace Akihito finds perfectly parallel lines in the tilt-function of his lens, takes beautiful photos from the bottom of the stairs leading up to the peak of Mount Muk Yue.

Akihito races up the steps round and round to the giant Buddha with Tao, gloating while wheezing like an old man when he wins by virtue of his longer legs. From up close, there is no statue; Akihito is lost beneath a lotus petal of smooth bronze, its shape indistinguishably bland and triangular.

He thinks maybe Feilong is lost too, beneath a lotus petal, thinking it an awning.

The vegetarian kichen is closed on public holidays, so Yoh and Feilong catches up to the younger men eventually holding two paper cups each of tofu custard, hawked by an old man in one of the open food stalls. They skip everything but the omikuji part of hatsumode, as a monastery is unable to provide the services of a shinto shrine, and even if the fortune comes from shaking a can full of painted sticks and redeemed at a fortune teller, Akihito's still gad he got great luck.

His phone rings halfway through the afternoon for the first time.

As Yoh hands him the ringing phone, it takes Akihito a moment to register that his parents are actually calling him on New Year's Day, the same as every year; Akihito speaks to his father for all of three minutes, his mother for a bit longer, then when the phone's being passed to his father again, the connection drops. Cell phones are terrible, there's no dial-tone to ring in the rejection, and Akihito questions it loudly for seconds before he moves it away from his ear.

He stares at the phone for a full minute, expecting one of his parents to call him back.

When Yoh takes it out of his hand and wraps an arm around him, pulling Akihito close to his side, he instinctively leans into the warmth through two layers of suit and a long cashmere coat. But that crushing loneliness he used to feel, that coldness in his chest that used to leave him quiet in a crowded room, what Yoh seems to be concerned about - he doesn't feel that anymore.

New Year's is for family, Akihito knows, and he's always borrowed family from friends, tagged along behind Takato's siblings like an ugly duckling with his dirty blond hair never quite fitting in. This year, though the shrine is wrong and the country is different and the language around him takes interpreting and no one here he's with is related to each other, he thinks he understands the spirit of it, feels wholly belonging to it, for the first time in his life.

* * *

A year to the day he wakes up in Hong Kong with a throbbing pain in the chest and a million questions, Akihito looks into the bathroom mirror and sees Feilong's eyes reflected back at him.

It's only there for a half second at most, but he sees the pain and the resentment and hatred and something like hope, all squashed down and pitiful mewling at the bottom, a perfect reproduction of Feilong's Pandora steel trap of a mind. Akihito is immediately dyspnoeic, collapses onto the bathroom floor hyperventilating until Yoh comes to fetch him when he doesn't show up for breakfast.

"I have to go," he tells Yoh, breathing into a paper bag dark at the bottom with grease, yaotiao discarded on the floor. "I need to go."

Akihito has realised for a while that he no longer has a home he longs for; whatever feeling he called homesickness has faded to a dull ache, whatever memories of a kotatsu he has at home, he was always alone in them, waiting for a phone to ring. He knows where his heart is, feels the rips and tears of everything's that's nesting there these days, and there is a scintilla of who he used to be buried as deep as Feilong's hope; if he doesn't find a way to drag it out of them they'd both be lost.

Yoh doesn't say anything important, and what he does say comes in soft murmurs, all of it along the lines of  _it's going to be okay_ , and Akihito is so inured to the scent of death on Yoh he believes it, feels safety in the thick of it, until as soon as they part he remembers,  _I need distance_.

Yoh makes him skip the sparring session, so Akihito doesn't get to see Feilong until 10pm, long after the last of the jitters from his panic attack has worn off.

He goes on the offensive, "Is this what you wanted? Me becoming you?"

"Excuse me?" Feilong seems confused. Well, he shouldn't be.

"Do you have any idea," Akihito stares daggers at him, over the serenity of their blue-white china tea set. "Do you even know what you're doing to me?"

"Oh, I do plenty of things to you. You're going to have to be more specific," Feilong says, leaning back in his chair with mocking insouciance.

Feilong does this every time Akihito gets serious, when he steers their conversation towards those walls Feilong's thrown up all over himself, "Don't you fucking patronise me!"

"Akihito, what's the matter?" And Yoh must have told him about the attack, because Feilong's used to his occasional outbursts by now. "Talk to me."

"No. You talk to me. I'm so sick and tired of - watching you suffer," Akihito points an accusatory finger at Feilong, though he cannot stop the trembling in it for all the red he sees. "You did warn me that it doesn't hurt any less, that you won't get any better, but you know what? I'm tired of it. You've lied to yourself long enough."

"I haven't lied to you," Feilong demurs, which just makes Akihito angrier.

"You lie to yourself," Akihito barks out, "And you refuse - every single time I've brought it up - you refuse to talk about it."

"I have no idea what you're talking about," and there, one minute after Feilong has declared otherwise, he's lying to Akihito's face with both eyes open.

Well, it's time for him to face the fucking facts, "Asami didn't kill your father."

"Don't," Feilong says, eyes flashing in warning.

"And what, go back to our everyday?" Akihito's eyebrows draw together in annoyance. "Go back to sucking venom out of your open wounds when you just what, make  _more_?"

"Please don't," Feilong says again, and though his tone is not pleading, he shrinks a little into himself. "I don't want to talk about this, Akihito."

"That's too fucking bad - I do," Akihito only gets louder, "I wouldn't even mind taking in all the venom you can dish out - if it fucking helps!"

"Stop," says Feilong, sharp cold edge creeping into his voice. "If you value your life you'll stop that now."

"Or what, or you'll kill me?" Akihito sneers, lets out a soft chuckle, "Then kill me. I'm not any good to you if you won't let me help you. And as long as I'm stuck here, I'm no good to anyone - not even myself. Go ahead. Kill me."

Feilong's always armed - even when he's naked, probably. There's a gun under his pillow and knives in his side table and who knows what woven into his clothes. Within the blink of an eye Feilong's out of his chair and a knife moves in a flash of silver and it's instantly held flat against Akihito's throat.

"We don't have to do this," Feilong says, but he has none of his usual composure. There's a crazed glimmer in his eyes that heralds a distant storm and high waves, Akihito's set off an earthquake. "Don't push me."

Akihito's not sure which of them's the stronger one, but he knows he will get up and fight back every single time. There's a tsunami coming, the seas calm and the rumble in the distance a quiet hum, so Akihito chooses to stand there with his arms spread wide on the shore they share. He leans forward now, into the blade, doesn't pause when it cuts into him, when a line of blood appears thinly over his neck and Feilong drops the knife as though it's red hot.

"Oh god," Feilong starts to back himself up to the wall. "I am so, so sorry -"

Akihito takes a step forward for every one Feilong takes to get away in lockstep, until he's close enough to kiss him, close enough to see how terrified Feilong is for something he thinks he's almost done but never could have. He throws his arms around Feilong to drag him down to the floor, where the wood is cool and he could tuck Feilong's head beneath his chin.

"It's just a scratch," Akihito says, hands smoothing down Feilong's trembling shoulders. "I'm fine. Just - listen to me."

"What are you going to tell me," Feilong asks, wraps his arms around Akihito tentatively, his hands resting on Akihito's back light as a feather, as if he think he doesn't deserve this.

"I'm going to tell you some terrifying truths," Akihito smiles into Feilong's forehead, damp with sweat, a curve of warm lips and a breath to warm him.

"You're not doing a very good job of convincing me," says Feilong with a huff.

"You are everything to me," Akihito says, steady, and he knows himself to be the other half of their anchor. Maybe it keeps them in place, but it stops them from being washed away, too. "You are the family I never had, my father and mother and all the siblings, even though I don't even know what it's like to have siblings." Akihito breathes in and holds it for seconds, breathing out, "I love you."

Feilong needs - a father. Akihito only know how to live without one; he can't give anyone anything, doesn't even have the model of a proper father to gift Feilong, but he thinks he has something better.

"Oh," Feilong clutches at Akihito's back, nails tearing into silk, afraid to let go. "But I - and I thought - what about Yoh -"

"I'm  _in love_  with Yoh. I love you. It's not the same thing," Akihito tightens his arms for a moment, to remind Feilong that he's deserving of affection whether he thinks so or not. "I think you taught me that."

Feilong relaxes into the embrace, but he objects, "I'm in no shape to teach anyone anything - least of all about love."

For someone who falls so deeply, leaves himself open to be hurt so easily, Feilong thinks - and knows - very little of himself.

"Stop contradicting me," Akihito presses a chaste touch to Feilong's lips. "Here's what's so terrifying about it all: if you had actually cut my throat just then," and he waits until the silence between them befits the words he's about to say, let the pin drop like a thousand bricks. "I would have used my last breath to forgive you."

Feilong gapes at him, eyes widening as he sucks in a breath of air, remembering to breathe, "That is terrifying."

"Yeah. I figured that out when you shot Wei," it's the first time since the incident that Akihito's even mentioned that name. "I wasn't even mad at you. Not for a split second. I just thought - if it's you or him, or you or anyone, I'd always choose you. It's not ... it's nothing to do with anything you do."

Akihito has no role model of his own, he can only follow his feelings as sure and ceaseless as the tides, waters inundating a barren beach where they meet. It's the boundless acceptance of family - no matter how much time may pass, no matter with whom they each choose to fall in love with, this is a constant from which other relationships cannot encroach.

It's what Feilong's always wanted, never thought he can have, and Akihito would offer it as well as he can. Akihito feels as big as an ocean, vast and endless, as if he could feed Feilong's heart by the spoonfuls in perpetuity.

"I need you to listen - and think - very carefully now," Akihito says, pulling away just enough for them to focus on each other, and he does not speak again until Feilong nods. "What did your father say to you, when he was dying?"

Akihito had most of the story by the end of the summer, and the details were filled in gradually, dragged out of Feilong among other snippets of his brother, of his father, of being children in their old estate. It's a degraded, hardly usable negative, but Akihito has pierced together something like a grainy picture of a functional family that fell dramatically apart.

"Please forgive Yan," Feilong says, and still he fights it, eyes darting left and right trying not to see the truth. He repeats, "He said, 'All of this is due to my foolishness.'"

"Keep going," the key is next, Akihito knows it, and Feilong has all the pieces.

"'Though I know Yan has become reckless, he is after all my beloved son,'" Feilong does, dredges up the memories from the depths, those words turning over and over without connecting. It didn't made any sense -

"And what does that mean to you now," Akihito clasps his hands over Feilong's ears, rubs his thumbs beneath Feilong's eyes - wide with unmistakable horror. "Think. Use that sharp mind of yours. What exactly does he want you to forgive Yan for?"

Feilong can't shake him loose, where Akihito's not touching him insensate, so he lets himself fall into Akihito's eyes, into a gaze that accepts everything he is, the ruthless killer part of him, the cruel and mercurial moods, his redacted past playing on a loop. The pieces he's refused to put together has been rattling in there for years, and now he isn't given a choice to leave them all on the floor any longer.

"Please," Akihito holds him tighter, his hands warm; they still Feilong's trembling limbs and the coolness in his arms. "You can do this."

He can understand why Feilong wanted Yantsui to be innocent of the crime - Akihito had wanted to think Wei was innocent too, and he's only known Wei for all of four weeks. But Yoh hasn't let Akihito lie to himself for a second; Akihito's not going to let Feilong do it either.

"He asked me to - to forgive the man who shot him," Feilong stumbles, but doesn't falter. "Yan shot him. Father would have told me who did, otherwise."

Akihito feels the corner of his mouth lift up; those last moments Feilong's missed, those scant minutes before he made it to his father's room, what happened in there can be deduced, and Feilong has been avoiding it. It's far easier to pin it all on one outsider than whatever's left of his family. Feilong hasn't noticed how Yantsui has metastasized, tainted even his most treasured memories, but Akihito has, and he's not sorry at all for cutting him out.

"And then what did he tell you?" He prompts,  _just one more thing_.

"He reminded me that I was his son. Oh," his memories and Akihito's words merge, and the answer is clear as water, and it is the last stone in the proverbial dam; Akihito's there to catch him, thumbs stroking over his cheeks to brush away every drop of his tears.

"That's how much he loved his sons," Akihito sighs,  _finally_ , gives Feilong the reassurance he's always needed. "That's how much he loved you."

Feilong's always wanted more than those last few moments, but he sees that there's more - a lot more - hidden away; his father may have never praised him, never gave a word of comfort, but he's always been concerned. Even that one act of banishment had been protection, an attempt to separate him from Yantsui's obvious obssession.

It's probably what killed him, in the end.

Feilong can sort out the threads now, to find the bits and pieces of his father's love embedded in all those years lost; the little conversations placating Yantsui, making him feel the victor, so Feilong could become a wholly separate person from his brother. The past can't be changed, but his memories of them has shifted, illuminated by Akihito's light.

Later, Akihito folds them into bed tucked beneath a comforter, their usual position reversed. Akihito holds Feilong in the crook of his arm in easy intimacy neither would trade for anything. Feilong's never had the luxury of this before - this simple affection from another, not since he had been a slip of a child, small enough to sit on his father's shoulders in old photographs, caught in strong and steady arms too far in time to remember, before the age came, as they always did in families like theirs, where affection had been deemed unseemly in the raising of a boy.

With a start, Feilong realises that he's not angry. The rage that threatened to drive him mad - the susurrous prodding of vengeance, ever present - has dulled to a low hum, so quiet he has to strain to hear it.

"What will I do now?" In the past he would keep this all in his head until it explodes outwards in fits and tantrums, but now, there is someone who would listen. "I've operated on rage for the past five years - what will become of me?"

Akihito sleepily mumbles over his head, weary in post adrenaline crash, "That's bullshit and you know it." He kisses Feilong soft over his brow, lets him be the child he's never allowed to be, "You are so much more than rage. Rage can only break things - you rebuilt your father's organization from literal shambles."

"I think you're biased," Feilong says, but he can't hide his smile.

"I am," Akihito agrees. "Your father would have been proud. He was already proud."

"Are you?" Feilong's arms squeezes him tighter.

"I am very proud of you," Akihito feels extremely silly, being both younger in age and experience, but he says it anyway. The squirming he gets in return is so worth it.

Akihito thinks Feilong must have been a kind child, a soft wisp of a thing, one who easily attached himself to people and just as easily, hurt; he possessed all the signs of a childhood full of love, recently denied. Until his brother had methodically chipped his innocence away with blood and murder and what had amounted to sexual slavery he must have been a lot like this affectionate, compliment-fishing crybaby.

It is awfully endearing. Though they've never met, Akihito feels he can understand Asami a little - a younger, less guarded, more vulnerable and equally prissy Feilong, so starved for affection he had looked for it in a stranger, would have raised in anyone such protective instincts, the want to shield him from anything, as to be irresistible.

Akihito can't gift Feilong a father, no - but he knows how to live without one, how to lean on his friends when he needs it, how to seek out connections when the family he's been given fails him year after year.

It's easy enough to gift Feilong what he already has.

"I know you want your family back, but if you can't see how you already have one - a family you made all on your own, even before I got here, then I don't know what to tell you."

Feilong just burrows deeper into his embrace, hiding his face, though Akihito can spot the telltale bashful redness on the tips of his ears.

"You'd want to go home, though," says Feilong.

"Shut up. You know where my heart is," Akihito replies, such is a night for truths, it doesn't even sound embarrassing until it comes out of his mouth.

"You'll come visit, won't you?" Feilong peeks through the fringe of his long eyelashes, "Every month?"

"Every two months," Akihito says, then adds after a beat, "and every New Year's."

"Then I'll come see you every other month," Feilong says, wanting his way.

"How is the Yamaguchi-gumi situation?" It's been a year; Akihito wonders if they even remember him.

"I'll work on it," Feilong promises.

It is not until much later, with the sky brightening through curtains they never bothered to close, and the sound of Hong Kong awakens in the distance, of construction and traffic congestion filtering through thick window panes, that Feilong wakes with a start, pins Akihito to the bed and exclaims, "You're really in love with Yoh?"

Akihito doesn't even have his hands free so he can groan into them.

* * *

Avoidance hasn't been serving him well for five years, and in hindsight it seems silly to avoid the man who'd taken a stab wound and falling beams to protect him all those years ago, so Feilong picks up the phone and dials Asami on his unlisted business line the next day.

"Asami Ryuichi," he picks up after the first ring, like Feilong's expected.

"Asami. It's Liu Fei Long," this is nerve wracking, he thinks. Feilong never had a problem calling Asami to snipe at him over spies and stolen deals and the wrong sort of alliance the man makes with Feilong's enemies, but this is  _difficult_. "It has been a while."

"It has been a year since you called to yell at me over that business in Ikebukuro that I had nothing to do with," says Asami, smooth as silk in sonorous baritone. "And as I recall, you hung up."

"I'm not calling to pick a fight," Feilong manages without seeing red, but just barely. Asami can be such an asshole. "I thought we could arrange a meeting. About a possible alliance."

"Well, that is a surprise," Asami sounds anything but.

And since Akihito has honed his snarkiness, Feilong says, "As if you haven't been watching my every move for years."

"If you'd take better care of yourself I wouldn't have to send you babysitters," Asami swats back.

For the longest time he's filed Asami away as a cold, heartless manipulator who had ripped Feilong's family apart, but the truth is far less dramatic. They had both been younger, and had possessed equally terrible personal communications skills - maybe they still do. Even now Asami's concern comes off as mild annoyance, as if Feilong hasn't had another five years to grow up.

Honestly, Feilong feels as volatile as ever, but he's tempered by responsibility now. Asami's voice dredges up all kinds of unnamable feelings; there's still this want in him to make Asami his, but it's not a need - Feilong has what he needs. Perhaps it isn't even Asami that he wants, only the idea of him, a spark of affection in his then tumultous life. 

Perhaps it's time to take a chance and find out for sure.

"I will," and the silence he gets through the line is gratifying. It must have surprised Asami, to not hear Feilong hiss over needing people to take care of him. "But that's not what I'm calling about."

"Let's see if we can find us a good midway point and time then," Asami says, above the muffled sounds of folders being pushed aside and doors opening. "It's been five years. Honestly, I thought this day would never come."

Because he's spent far too much time with Akihito to not to, Feilong takes the opportunity and strikes, "Well that's surprsing - I've been told that older people experiences time differently so it shouldn't seem as long to you."

On the other side of Asia, Asami Ryuichi hears himself being called  _old_  for the first time in his life and has a coughing fit over his cigarette.

* * *

Feilong wasn't much of a habitual user, but it still shocked him to see his medicine bag covered in a layer of dust from disuse. It had been something he used to do to unwind at the end of the day, but Akihito had made such a face the first time that Feilong's had saved it for after the boy left for the night; then Akihito had stopped leaving for the night and Feilong had simply stopped smoking.

He can't remember why he started in the first place, but that's how a habit forms; going from want to need without our conscious consent.

It's still a part of his travelling manifiest, something to fill the evening hours when he's away, but this time it's not a fifteen minute helicopter ride but a three hour flight and far too long to be away from Akihito with Yantsui at large. Feilong thinks wryly that instead of his drugs he's taking Akihito with him, and he's not sure what that says about their relationship. Akihito's a habit that wakes and invigorates, lets him see the world clearly without dulling his senses, which just makes all the things he's planning so much more frightening. Feilong is hardly susceptible to fear but he's keeping Akihito near like he's a part of himself, can hardly function without knowing exactly where he is.

Akihito assures him that this is normal, "Your fears are justified - I almost got kidnapped, remember?"

But it's more than that, and it's overwhelming and unnamable, and Feilong's quite aware that love can be written with the same character as pain, never did learn the reason during those three weeks in Macau barring how he ached.

It doesn't really excuse his clingy behaviour, bringing a civilian to a business meeting and hiding him in a hotel room just a floor below the penthouse restaurant as though he wants to keep the invisibible string between them as short as possible. Feilong's even going so far as to leave Yoh with Akihito instead of bringing him to the meeting like he usually does; thankfully Asami is obliging and agrees to meet alone, guards outside of their private dining area so he's not the only one without an assistant.

They agree to meet in Shanghai mid-April, at an approximate halfway point on neutral ground: a hotel owned by Sion Corp. in an area Baishe controls. It's an appropriate location for a public meeting that will ripple through the underground rumour mill within hours.

Feilong spots Asami in the hotel lobby, immaculate in a three-piece bespoke herringbone suit and a light coat, looking much older than in Feilong's memories, perfectly put-together, every step careful and measured. It seems Feilong is not the only one that had walked away from the incident of their disastrous first meeting with scars. Asami has a near painful need for control.

There are more things for concern at the moment though. Asami's looking at something behind Feilong with interest, and it makes him turn. Akihito's looking at Asami with a look that can only be described as mocking, like he sees through Asami the way Feilong just has, except Akihito doesn't think he needs to hide it.

"One of your guards is a little short," Asami says by way of greeting. "And I believe he hates me."

By this time Akihito has had plenty of training, so he knows how to use the guns Feilong makes him wear for the trip just about as well as any of the other men, though he'll probably never catch up to Yoh. Hi goon suit is well-fitted but with hair like that, he'll never blend in with the others.

"He can handle himself," Feilong says as they board the elevator together.

"I'm sure," Asami acquiesces, his manner more urbane than Feilong remembers him ever being; these are moments that add up to a realisation that they're different people now, chiselled by time to be more, or less, than they were.

Feilong's convinced that Asami is - indubitably - less.

They're crowded on all sides by their six guards, Akihito on the one side of him, and he squeezes Feilong's hand before he gets off on his floor with Yoh. That's what makes Feilong more, he thinks; he's regained the willingness to get close to someone, to take chances, to leave himself open to hurt. It sounds like a disadvantage, but Asami's wrong and has always been wrong - bringing emotions into things is what makes life worth living.

Their business dinner is easy since Asami's making it easy, he irons out all of Feilong's inexperience without putting him down, carries them through with finesse and strength and appropriate flattery. By the time dinner's wrapped up and Asami skips dessert for scotch, they've decided on a partnership in a macau casino, a trade route for Feilong from Xiamen to Seoul, and the slow years-long future dismantling of one of the biggest yakuza groups in Japan with the help of Feilong's network of spies and assassins. It's to Asami's business advantage and Feilong's personal grudge, but whatever, Feilong has what he came for.

After four drinks to Feilong's one, Asami's business mask slips a fraction as they're ending their meeting, "You look younger than when I last saw you."

The last time Asami had seen him, Feilong had been bleeding out in his arms. Feilong files that away - wounds take a while to heal, even after one digs out the puss - and replies, "Clean living."

It's true too; Feilong doesn't drink or smoke as is, having no tolerance for the former and cancer in the family puts a damper on the urge to pick up the latter even in prison. Now he's quit the pipe, so barring some extra bullets he's probably going to live a good long while.

That, at least, gets him a laugh - the mask slips completely for a few seconds.

"I'll see you later then," Feilong pushes away from the table, knowing Asami gets the message loud and clear.

* * *

At 3am Akihito dodges three tackling attempts and trips up both of the guards, making it all the way to the elevator before the slow ascent of the lift has the guards catching up to him; Feilong slips out of his room after the first tackle and he's by the emergency stairwell and through it before the second guard falls over.

Asami's expecting him, waiting up with a pile of folders on the coffee table, bringing more work to work; in the bright lights of a hotel room and not the dim atmospheric incandescence of a fancy restaurant, he looks tired, dark under the eyes, cold and lifeless: a handsome mannequin. The years really hasn't been kind to him; even with his jacket off, no tie and his sleeves rolled up - a gesture of peace, to show he's unarmed - Asami looks fully mid-thirties, has aged right out of the softer featured twenties where they met.

It's good to see he's unguarded at least, that he sees Feilong as a friend and he feels he can dress down for their informal meeting.

"I'm assuming this isn't a social call," Asami doesn't get up from his armchair.

"No," Feilong settles on the sofa to one side. "I need a couple of personal favours."

Asami lights up a cigarette and tips his head to the side, "Off the record?"

"Completely. My organization - no, my entire extended family can't know," Feilong says.

"Right," Asami says, leaning forward, sharp eyes boring into him. "Yantsui's the first. What's the second?"

It's what Asami does best; he likes keeping people off balance. Feilong might have been irritated by this a year ago, but now he lifts an eyebrow without comment. If Asami needs to telegraph control to make himself feel better in order to cover up for some hidden insecurity, he's welcome to do so.

Feilong lays out the second favour in detail.

"Are you sure about this? You seem rather attached to the kid," Asami asks, after Feilong says his piece.

"No, I'm not sure. I couldn't even leave him at home this time, and Tokyo's farther," Feilong laughs, and the sound startles Asami to look at him, a rare wistfulness in his gaze. "What?"

"I've never heard you laugh like that," Asami says. His smile is not unkind, "Maybe I ought to get myself a mistress."

The thought of Akihito being called a mistress to his face and the reactions that would engender has Feilong in a literal giggle fit that has him hiding his face behind a hand, "Give me a moment."

Asami gives him that moment, and then, "You seem happy."

"I am," Feilong says, wiping away moisture from the corner of one eye with the back of his hand. "Speaking of Akihito, he has a question for you."

"And you may ask," Asami says, and  _he may or may not answer_ unvoiced.

They haven't touched on their history yet; there are some things in families that are just not talked about, like the issue of Feilong's parentage in his old home, like the work his brother had asked him to do, way back when. It's rather like living around an armed bomb, everyone tiptoeing so as not to set it off. He hopes their new relationship isn't anything like that.

"Why did you leave me there, all those years ago? Why hadn't you stayed?" Feilong watches Asami's expression shutters into a blank mask as the words fall, and he chooses to continue anyway. "It would have cleared a lot of things up and we wouldn't have had this feud for so long."

"I'll have you know you started the feud by diverting one of my arm shipments," Asami says, all business.

"Water under the bridge," says Feilong with a dismissive wave. "Answer the question."

"Your boy wanted to know this?" Asami doesn't look stressed, exactly, just evasive as he reaches for another cigarette before the first one's done. "Why?"

"Well, his exact words were, 'I can only think of one good reason why the bastard left you there, and it's not pretty. He needs to grow the fuck up and own it.'" Feilong watches Asami go from blank to bemused.

Akihito is like water; he only seems soft, and insinuates into whatever crevices he finds himself, inevitably expanding in the chill to crack you wide open. Even by proxy, Akihito moves people, stripping off a practiced mask by foul words alone.

Asami rubs at his temples, "Unbelievable. I'm getting a lecture from your boy toy."

"Don't call him that," that made him snap, instinctive. Then Feilong shrugs, "He said it'd help?"

"With what?" Asami barks, and it's odd, the sudden outburst, like it's touched a nerve. He checks himself, "I don't dwell on the past. How can it help anything?"

"I quote, 'That constipated look on his face,'" Feilong says, and he can't keep his expression straight any longer and laughs. "Just, humour me. I think I deserve to know."

Asami picks up his ashtray and takes it to a table by the window, and he stares out through the floor to ceiling glass at the night like a painting. It's impossible to read the straightness of his back, the cut of his shoulders, how much weight he may carry.

Shanghai is just as bright at night as Hong Kong, but there's more of it, an endless twinkling sea of metropolitan lights. Feilong almost thinks Asami's going to dodge the question, he's taking so long to answer it; but he stubs out the remnants of his cigarette and turns slightly.

"I failed," it's just two words, but they're as heavy as lead and trails off into long silence.

It rings.

It's bright enough in the room that the window's halfway a mirror, and Asami speaks through it, as though the distance of reflection and lambency makes it easier to admit failure, a personal blight, a patch of black permanent ink in his record.

"I ... misjudged Toh. your father was dead, your brother was on the run, Baishe had no leader so I also inadvertently started an underground war." Asami runs a hand through his hair, "I made a hell of a mess. I ran away. Is that what you wanted?"

"That certainly clears things up," Feilong says. "For five years I thought you just ... didn't care."

"Oh, I cared. That was the problem," Asami must have let that simmer for years because it's intense enough for Feilong to instinctively lean back. "I ran to your house half-cocked because you went willingly into a trap and I - cared. Things might have been different if I thought things through and maybe brought backup."

"They wouldn't have been. My brother was set on stopping anyone from separating us," Feilong says, having time enough to think about it now - Yantsui's obsession had been spilling over into work. It had been a matter of time before it would have drowned them all alive; Asami had been at the wrong place at the wrong time - surely he'd figured it out. "He's still going after anyone who gets close to me, going so far as to send someone to kidnap Akihito. It's hardly your fault, what happened."

"Regardless, I lost my head briefly," Asami says, blank and determined. "It will not happen again."

It's as close to an apology as Feilong's going to get, and it's more than he needs, but he doesn't want penance. From his brother, maybe. "So what, are you saying you're never going to care about anyone again?"

"Men like us," Asami's profile is back to the calm of an ocean, which is to say the surface does not match the undertow, "we can't afford to lose our heads. Because when we do - a lot of people die."

"Don't bring ridiculous feelings into work, right," Feilong says, and he remembers it like it was yesterday - and for them, it is, and it will be as long as they carry it around with them and let the weight of it crush them. "I remember. What about outside of work?"

"I don't have time for much else," Asami says, leaning back against the glass with his hands in his pockets. It takes a beat before he adds, as if to convince himself, "I enjoy my work."

"It totally shows," Feilong says in affected monotone. "You look like you aged ten years."

"I can't claim clean living," Asami smirks down at him with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth.

"You know what I mean. It's hard to do this without a purpose," Feilong goes to join him at the window. "You don't even have a family to impress. What is it all for?"

"We do quite well for ourselves," Asami shrugs.

"You did quite well for yourself five years ago," Feilong challenages, "And now you own hotel chains and night clubs and real estate in the most populous cities in Japan. Just on those you're by all accounts a billionaire. You can have anything you want now. Why work so hard and risk your life for more?"

"You tell me yours, I'll tell you mine," Asami says, leaning towards Feilong enough for the gesture to be flirtatious.

"In the beginning? Survival. And then I guess - keeping Baishe in the Liu family and vengeance. Now," Feilong smiles, and his entire face genuinely, truly brightens. "Now I have a family again. I need to protect them."

Asami looks down at him close, scrutizing the change in each expression, divining Feilong's secrets. He takes a full minute to digest Feilong's words before he says with a light chuckle and a shake of his head, "You win."

Feilong is dumbfounded, "What?"

"I do what I do," Asami says, pulling away from the window to stand at his full height, cutting an imposing figure next to Feilong, almost intimidating. "Because I like to stand in a room with - anyone, really, even the Prime Minister of Japan - and know that I have more. That I'm the most powerful person in that room, that everyone there is dancing on the palm of my hand and I'm the one in control. And I like the work that takes me there."

"That's ..." Feilong can't finish the sentence without something insulting, so he doesn't.

The silence hangs in the air like a sheet of thin ice. Asami breaks it.

Asami gathers a lock of Feilong's hair that's fallen over his cheek, tucking it behind his ear. "You have more. In this room, with you and me in it - you win," and he looks a little lonely for having been left behind. "You don't look at me like you used to."

"I grew up. I'm not the boy who'd beg for scraps of affection at your table any longer," Feilong has strong words, though the touch is welcome; he remembers Asami's hands, how gentle they had been to him, and at that time in his life had been as a ripe peach to a dying man. "I know better now."

It seems natural to grab a hold of Asami's collar, drag him down, and kiss him then. It's almost chaste; just a touch of the lips and barely a swipe with his tongue. Asami tastes of cigarettes and scotch, fills Feilong's nose with expensive cologne and matching aftershave, and it's a lovely kiss in its own way but there's something missing - the shape of it, the way they fit together, is just short of enough. Either Asami is less than he was, or Feilong has grown out of the want for him.

"Didn't you just say you know better?" Asami grins down at him when Feilong lets him go.

"I needed to know it's finished," Feilong says. "Over and done with. I did think about wanting you to be mine, but - Akihito wouldn't approve."

"Great, now I'm disapproved of. By your brat," Asami says, but he does not stop smiling. "I may have figured that out from the way he glared at me."

"'Definitely not the asshole who didn't visit you even once in the hospital 'cause you don't need his half-assed feelings,'" Feilong says in his best bratty Akihito impression, giggling out of it by the end.

"In other words, I'm not worth the trouble," Asami says, looks nearly - genuinely - disappointed.

Feilong wonders just how many times in his life Asami has been considered 'not worth the trouble' romantically, and considers maybe this is the first time and the man probably deserves a drink or five after that insult.

"Life's too short. It's all or nothing," Feilong says.

"More wisdom from your Akihito?" Asami lifts an eyebrow, and there's something in his eyes Feilong distinctly does not like, the wrong kind of predatory interest that makes his hackles rise. "I must admit I'm intrigued."

"He's not 'mine,' he's his own person. Also," Feilong says in warning, "he's family."

"Noted," says Asami as he turns to the window again.

Feilong watches the tired fine lines in Asami's face, remembers how he used to smile easier even at their first meeting, doesn't wonder if all of his own toiling just means he has that to look forward to: weary and without purpose save for a scoreboard like one of Tao's video games. Feilong knows he already has more than that, and it is only that, and not some extemporaneous altruism that makes him offer an olive branch of sorts to Asami before he leaves.

"Akihito's his own person," Feilong says, though even the thought of it twists his stomach up in knots, this must be how fathers feel. "He's free to be with whomever he chooses."

"Right," Asami has a look in his eyes that Feilong thinks must be why guns were invented. "I'll keep that in mind."

As the door is just about to close, Feilong remembers that he really isn't a very nice person, and sees no reason why he should start being one, even if Asami's fulfilling all of Feilong's wishes all tied up with a neat bow. If anything, Asami deserves a bit of lip after that look.

"He already knows you're an asshole," Feilong smiles, ever so sweetly. "So, good luck convincing him to choose you."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> At a Hong Kong temple, you get your fortune by shaking a can full of sticks until one falls out. You take that stick - it has a number on it - and redeem it at a stall, and you can either read it yourself or get a fortune teller to interpret for you.
> 
> On saying "I love you" in Chinese - yes, you've all heard the whole we Asians don't say the I love you thing. It's true. Akihito here used the words 疼惜, which directly translates to "ache" and "pity" but the word itself means to love and cherish. In a familial sense it can also mean to pamper. (Half the time they're conversing in Cantonese by this point.)
> 
> In case you're wondering why my "exact words" may be different from the scanlations, I'm reading the Chinese edition of the volumes.
> 
> Sidenote: So, you know, Feilong's brother's name is Yantsui, right? Well, wrong....
> 
> Or shall I say, sensei gave us the wrong katakana in the original. The characters she used (I checked both the Japanese and the Chinese raws) were 焰燕, which sounds like Yanyan in Mandarin, and Jimyin in Cantonese. Yan Yan. And it directly translates to "Flaming Swallow." Imagine being named Flaming Swallow and suddenly get a younger brother named Flying Dragon. Just ... imagine. And then imagine Toh and Elder Liu deciding on Feilong's name together and how that conversation went. What total assholes. Seriously, these two have the worst dads.
> 
> Yanyan. *pfft* This is why you read the notes, right?
> 
> Up next: the fluffiest fluff I've ever fluffed. Also, both of the next two chapters have smut. What is pacing.


	6. 疼 (Teng)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> 疼 : teng : hurts; sore; to love dearly
> 
> 疼惜 : teng xi : to cherish; to dote on
> 
> Akihito is turning twenty-one.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Beta-ed by [Green_Destiny](archiveofourown.org/users/Green_Destiny/pseuds/Green_Destiny) who is wonderful, much thanks for putting up with my run-on sentences and peppering my doc with lovely comments that made me giggle all over my desk.  
> *  
> You know how sometimes you get an idea, and then suddenly it takes 30k words to get there - this is the chapter that spawned the fic. This writer has zero regrets that a third of it is smut. Excuse me. *put face in hands and screams* ohmygod it exists (!!!)

Two weeks before Akihito's twenty-first birthday, Feilong drops a stack of magazines on Akihito's usually pristine desk along with a red permanent marker and declares, "Homework."

Akihito sifts through the stack and finds the last three issues of Non-No, GRIND, and Ollie, with a list taped to the top that looks like a walk-in closet manifest.

"I don't remember studying fashion design," Akihito says, face a mask of irritation that Feilong went shopping at Apollo without him.

"I'm buying you a wardrobe for your birthday," Feilong says, all smiles. "Your input is appreciated."

"You know how I feel about expensive gifts," Akihito says.

Feilong's eyebrows knit together, probably deciding on a stick or a carrot, to tell him he's going to buy him things whether Akihito chooses them or not, or to entice him with some sort of culinary bonus like a trip to the floating restaurant. When they're alone together now, Feilong wears all his emotions on his face. Akihito wonders if that's how mirror neurons work;, that if one person spends enough time with another they become a part of each other, that his own lack of artifice bleeds into Feilong and now he can read Feilong like an open book, too.

It's still a twist to their relationship when Feilong sweeps Akihito into a hug and gazes down at him with eyes all liquid. "Can I pick them out for you then?"

"No," Akihito says, but there's no strength behind it. "It's just too much."

"But you'll go home soon," Feilong says, and Akihito thinks Feilong and Tao must be related in some biological way because they make the same puppy eyes. "And I want you to have something to remember me by."

"Have you read the list? I don't need five suits," Akihito says.

The list is ridiculous, and includes two ski jackets, four coats and fifteen pairs of shoes, which isn't surprising since Feilong is ridiculous and extravagant and has two shoe closets.

"You need navy blue, black, a tux, and at least two more for special occasions. Five is minimum," Feilong says, making it sound almost reasonable. "Fill out the list?"

"And if I don't?" Akihito gives Feilong a defiant grin.

Feilong touches his forehead lightly against Akihito's, and either he's that good at acting or the shine in his eyes comes right out of a bottle. Akihito thinks it must be the latter. "Then I'll be very, very sad."

The nerve.

* * *

 

Akihito can feel the count-down from Shanghai, as if someone's set a timer on his back and he can hear the tick-tock-tick until the last tock hit his heels and he's back in Japan. It takes him about a week after coming back from Shanghai to figure out what's stressing him: he's distressed that he's not excited.

Getting what he once wanted can be a chore; he knows that from all the times he's sat across from his father in juvenile court, but this is a different kind of trepidation, a crawling unease not unlike waking up to realise he may as well be half the world away from home, but exponentially worse - this is a fucking full body panic.

There are places we call home where we sleep and eat and bathe, and Akihito's had that before he learned better.

"You can just stay here," Tao tells him over Gran Turismo 2, and he's going to be such an expert getaway driver when he grows up, the way he grinds all the other cars into the soft wall. "Hong Kong's just as good a place as Tokyo for a photographer."

Tao's right, but he doesn't understand the out-of-body experience that is living away from your birthplace, surrounded by a language that you can only understand through a filter of in-brain translation and food that's almost like what you had before but not quite. He can stay here but it'd never feel right, never where he truly belongs, being always a person of two worlds.

"I'll miss you too, Tao," Akihito says, and comes in first in the race for the first time because he's just petty enough to take advantage when a child is in tears.

* * *

 

On May 4th, Feilong braids his hair and throws on a pair of sunglasses and drags Yoh, Akihito and Tao to Ocean Park. Akihito's no stranger to aquariums, has been to plenty of them on casual dates, but Ocean park is ludicrous, hundreds of acres spread out below their cable car, South China Sea sparkling like diamonds, winding forest trails, ginormous theme park rides and small villages of games and recreated old Hong Kong. Ocean park is the Disneyland of aquariums.

Tao isn't tall enough yet to ride most of the roller coasters, so Yoh and Feilong take turns shuffling Akihito through side-gates. The view is stunning with tracks cut right into the side of a mountain, gates opening to what looks like infinite blue, the line where offing meets the sky invisible. Akihito feels on the cusp of limitless possibilities, staring into worlds incalculably beautiful and bigger than himself.

As they climb up, the steep stretch before the turn and fall and loop, as roller coaster rides do, Akihito feels, above all, brave. Akihito feels brave enough to jump - off a cliff into the ocean.

It is not the reckless fall into the abyss that he uses to abandon himself - not the beginnings of a plan followed through without writing the end, but the starting point of a journey knowing full well he will need to double-back, but the view is worth the ride anyhow. He'll not be alone when he lands, so it seems perfectly alright, perfectly safe, to jump. Akihito waits until they're just at the very top as the climb nears its end, where from one end to another of his vision is full of sky and nothing else, that he turns to Yoh and leans as close as the harness over his shoulders would allow.

"I think I'm in love with you," Akihito says, loud over the thin air high above the mountains, over the ocean breeze and the wind whipping at his hair.

There's no time for his heart to tumble, no time to check Yoh's reaction before his body takes the descent for him through the tracks - turn, loop, loop, everyone's screaming behind him and around him and Akihito can't help it, he does too, caught between exhilaration and fear and the plunge he's just taken. The movement renders him speechless, all the thoughts rushing out of his head to be replaced by the thrill of the fall, but he's said it, having held on to it for so long he was sure he'd take it to his grave, but he's finally said it.

Akihito steps off the ride wobbly, with limbs soft as sea jellies, his cheeks a tomato red. When Yoh catches him under the arms and helps him through the gates though, it is not hope Akihito feels, but rather a relief, having dropped something he's perceived as fragile, something he's thought of as brittle as glass only to find it on the ground inexplicably intact.

"Don't say anything," he says, with Yoh's arm around him wrapped in casual denim, Akihito blurts out all in one breath, "I know what your answer is you don't have to tell me I'd rather not hear it."

Yoh just ruffles his hair before they're off again to the next big thing, double-bumper cars, with Yoh and Feilong in their singles and Akihito riding with Tao. The day is filled thereafter with flashbulbs of carousels and swing rides and carnival games, Tao clinging to Akihito for most of it, Yoh winning them all stuffed dolphins with his unfair advantage of actually being an expert marksman.

It's not until the sun's about to set that Akihito feels his hand tugged, and they leave Feilong and Tao in a shop selling snacks from the 1960's, Yoh half-running with him towards the ferris wheel.

Akihito once exposed a roll of black and white ISO400 in his old manual Pentax, (the first camera he bought with his own money) by cracking the cap as he loaded film into his camera like a clutz. Except he didn't know he'd exposed it on loading - nobody does - and just kept on taking pictures 'til the end of the day, switching film three hours in thinking that all of his shots were safe. He'd come back to his house and wound up the film in the spinner and developed it. On checking the negatives on a lightbox, they came out all white, completely overexposed.

Those moments were lost forever - whatever he’d chosen at that point in time to commit to a roll of dead film instead of his memory, all gone.

Akihito thinks a Ferris wheel is like the Schrodinger's box of relationships: two people step in, two people step out, and something either dies between them or it doesn’t. A roll of his film is overexposed, or it is not, and his mind is already made up that it is; the sky is orange purple pink spreading over a horizon of fire behind Yoh, his head just blocking out the sun, and Akihito thinks even ISO100 would be blown out with this much light.

Yoh pats the seat next to him, and Akihito feels it like a string being pulled.

"The sun's in your eyes sitting there, right?" Yoh says.

It's all that kindness that kills him, Akihito considers this as he leans against Yoh's side - he's always allowed this closeness, and so long as he didn't ask for more, he can have as much of this as he wants. But between the innocence of a dive in Kowloon Bay and the new maturity of now, Akihito's become greedy, this easy affection becoming insufficient.

Akihito wonders if that makes him selfish, the way he's never dared to want something for himself.

"You've been avoiding me all day," Yoh says.

Ocean park has one of those old fashioned open-air ferris wheels, tea-cup seats shadowed by a parasol, and the boarding takes them stopping and ascending through slow minutes. Akihito can deny the avoidance, he can't deny the skittishness, the evasion; he hasn't met Yoh in the eyes all day.

"I'm just," scared, Akihito thinks. The side that’s leaning against Yoh tingles, every little touch a revelation and all so staggering. "I know you think I'm just a kid, and -"

"Shh," Yoh says, chiding. "Don't tell me what I think."

"Sorry," Akihito says, reflexive.

"I think you're pretty amazing." Yoh has his arm around Akihito, and the touch is light, just a tap on the shoulder, his elbow resting on the railing behind them. "You're a quick learner - it probably took me a year to get to where you did in six months. You're also very, very sharp. Good instincts. You have a knack with people that very few have. In time, you'll be damn formidable."

"I hear a 'but' coming." Akihito tries to tamp down his own vain hope.

"You're terrible at keeping your mouth shut," Yoh says with a wry smile.

Akihito waits, vibrating out of his skin. The ferris wheel clicks up another five feet with Akihito's heart in his throat, their shadows that fall on the seat across from them taking on sunset colours.

"I do care for you a great deal," says Yoh, his grip on Akihito's shoulder tightening a fraction. "I'd protect you with my life."

Akihito steals a glance, catching the light off Yoh's cheekbones just so; there's a line of bright sun along his profile, casting his eyes, his nose, his mouth in shadow, lips a thin knife edge. Has the world always been this bright? It's blinding, how beautiful the sky is, the sea, the shadows in the mountains behind them, the skyscrapers ever present even here cutting into the sunset. It makes Akihito's anger simmer, this light; how he can have all this for the perfect photograph but just the wrong quality, spectacular for a landscape when what he wants is a portrait, a close-up, leaving him with a burned-in afterimage of what could have been.

Akihito knows it's coming, he waits for it, for the next words to drop and for the moment - suspended in amber as it is - to end. The evanescent rays of sunset around them veil his arms in warmth but it's a warmth gained and lost all at the same time, slipping through and past him. Where does a flame go, when it dies?

"But I've already decided to dedicate my life to someone else," Yoh says, turning to press a soft kiss to Akihito's temple. "I can't give you my everything."

Akihito hears himself say, "I know," but this voice cracks and can't be his. It’s too heavy so it can't be his, he already has so much and should be happy and he's not and he shouldn't be greedy - but he is.

"Hey," Yoh's wiping at his tears, holding him closer, making comforting noises. It makes Akihito feel undeserving somehow, not nearly good enough for Yoh's kindness. He rubs at his eyes with his sleeves, "I'm being ungrateful. I mean, I should be happy that you're so good to me."

"You should feel exactly the way you feel." Yoh must know it sounds harsh, and he adds, "I mean, you can't feel any way but the way you do. That's fine."

The ride must be over, but Yoh waves off the attendant every time they're supposed to disembark, and the sky quickly darkens above them as the sun sinks below the horizon. As Akihito waits for his tears to stop, the air drops ten degrees. It's too lit-up in Ocean park to see the stars at night but Akihito knows they're there beyond the dome of city light glow from the evenings he's spent with Yoh and Tao at Tai Mei Tuk. However overwrought he is now, there is all that undertow, the accumulated affection of their days and nights. It's grown wings and claws, the beast that's scrabbled at his heart walls for a year, and it hurts less than Akihito thought it would have to let it free.

"When Feilong figured me out the first time," Akihito think to mention it, now that it's out in the open. "He offered me you."

Yoh snorts, "I apologize that my boss is a patently terrible person."

"Isn't he though," Akihito laughs, then his voice settles, shy suddenly. "Would you have?"

"This was - last year? When you were nineteen? No." Yoh's combing fingers through Akihito's hair, rough and warm, gently brushing against his ear.

Akihito feels even braver, for what’s left after blatant heartbreak. "And now?"

"Hah," Yoh smiles lightly, and when he turns toward Akihito. It's a considering look, inviting, with just a hint of heat. "Now, I don't think he should be the one asking, do you."

The wheel turns again, stopping just off the zenith. Akihito's dreamt of those eyes, looking at him just like this with banked hunger and want, a slow burn. He reaches out, fingers trembling, clutching at Yoh's denim jacket to pull him an inch closer. It's fully dark now, as dark as Hong Kong gets. The lights are coming on beneath them casting a glow from horizon to horizon, and above them the sky brightens from distant lights. It's breathtaking, and they're both missing it. Akihito, for once, could care less that he doesn't have his camera.

"Do you even know what you do to me when you look at me like that?" Yoh says, his hand that’s combing through Akihito's hair stilling, the heat of it burning through his skin.

Akihito hasn't a clue what Yoh's talking about, and he's just about to retort how Yoh's the one who's looking at him like a hawk to a rabbit when the wheel clicks again, moving them closer to the sky.

"Like what," Akihito says as they sit suspended at the very top of the summit, Hong Kong spread out like a sea of stars below them, moonless gleam of the night a canopy above, each second stretching to an eternity.

"We have twenty seconds," Yoh says, nonsensical, with the space around him positively humming.

Akihito feels the air turn syrupy slow between them, where time crawls to a stop and Yoh's lips touches his and the world does not collapse so much as fade away. It's hot; Yoh always run a little warm, his hands, his sides, his forehead, when they touch, startlingly hot. And his lips are scorching on Akihito, the cavern of his mouth feverish soft, and it's as good as he remembers, the shock of that touch, electric. That touch from a year ago he recalls only in dreams are here, time pulled to a taffy, lips tingling as Yoh swipes his tongue across them, all the hair on his head standing on end.

It lasts forever and twenty seconds, and though Akihito doesn't want it to end, the wheel clicks. The world fades back into being in soft vignette, the edges of his vision inky black. Akihito has no idea what he looks like from Yoh's view, only that he can't properly close his mouth, that he can't stop staring, that his cheeks are suffused with heat and his mouth tingles and his lips must be kiss swollen and wet, the air rushing across them too cold. As he breathes in it pulls a shivery sigh out of him.

"That look." Yoh's gazing at him with a lopsided half-smile. "You're impossible to say no to."

"Feilong says it would only hurt me to be with you," Akihito says, brushing a finger across his own lips, relishing the lingering heat.

"He's right," Yoh says with rarified soft eyes, wistfully sweet. "It will."

"But I'm an adult who can make my own decisions." Akihito can only think he wants more, a sip of nectar nowhere near enough.

"That you are," Yoh agrees.

"And it's my birthday," Akihito continues.

"Soon." Yoh checks his phone, "It will be your birthday - in three and a half hours."

It's so hard to ask for things like this, even with Yoh's indulgent smile inches from his face, Yoh's fingers in his hair and sitting close enough to fill his senses with cigarette and powder tang, even as the wind gusts all around them.

"I think I'm legal in Hong Kong!" Akihito exclaims, and throws on a smile that makes him look around seventeen.

It's not rare to hear Yoh laugh anymore, but it's still so lovely when he does. The sharpness of his cheekbones that Akihito loves so much, and the corners and edges of him softens in the radiance of it. Akihito is spellbound as Yoh jokes, "Now you can get into all the movies."

If Akihito wants something, he's going to have to ask for it, he knows Yoh's being a proper adult, wouldn't think of coercing him into anything. Akihito takes a deep breath and nearly stammers, "Sleep with me. Tonight," and because Akihito's spent nights in Yoh's bed and Yoh's cradled him on a bad day in his arms, he adds, "And I don't mean just sleep. Um."

"Okay." Yoh's smile is somewhere between amusement and a laugh, his touch is light, but his gaze is making promises Akihito's sure he can keep. "Do you want to get some ice cream before dinner?"

The attendant's cheeks are as red as Akihito's, and though they're not peppered with questions the minute they get back to the reproductions of Tong lau, they do find Tao and Feilong sitting with matching parfaits suspiciously in an ice cream parlour like Yoh's planned this. Feilong looks expectant, smirks significantly when Yoh brings Akihito a banana split and _dear god so many regrets why did he order that_.

Tao clings to Akihito for at least forty-five seconds too long when the limo stops to drop him off, mumbling about wanting to go with them to dinner. The sharp, insightful part of Akihito thinks they are all planning something behind his back, but the rest is just too pumped full of frenetic energy to ponder beyond the thought of his plans for the evening just past midnight.

Feilong, of course, corners him in the back of the limo after mashing the partition button until it jams shut. "I want all the details." And Feilong's smile suggests he has exactly the wrong idea.

"He turned me down?" Akihito figures he'd better strike down the misunderstanding fast before Feilong gets invested and decides to punch Yoh. "Well, I expected him to turn me down. And he did."

"You look far too happy for someone who's been rejected." Feilong frowns, reaching for Akihito's hand.

Akihito turns a cherry tomato red. "He agreed to sleep with me."

He's strong enough to handle having his heart broken, wants to carve Yoh inside him so he wouldn't forget, wouldn't settle for anyone less, and he wants Feilong to approve but all Feilong's giving him is a light frown, knitted brows full of worry. "Are you sure?"

"No," Akihito says. And because Feilong telegraphs deepening concern in every muscle of his face, he adds, "I mean, I'm sure I want him. I've wanted him a long time. I'm just not sure if it's a good idea."

"And you thought jumping into Kowloon Bay in April was a good idea, so I worry," says Feilong, who has a very valid point.

"Life is all about risk and reward." Akihito feels the push at his back, the quiet whisper of life's too short, and he's reminded of all the regrets that a dead man can't have. "So what if I end up hurt over this - I'm hurt enough waiting, thinking that I'm not good enough, that he'd never ... want me."

"You're so dense sometimes." Feilong flicks Akihito on the forehead. "He's wanted you since last October."

"What?" Akihito probably should feel stupid, he has no idea. "Really? Why didn't he say anything?"

"I've known Yoh five years and I've had to push promotions on him all this time - he's never asked for anything." Feilong looks a bit sad, and this doesn't really clear up anything. "He isn't nearly as selfish as I am."

"I don't know anybody as selfish as you are," Akihito snipes, nervous at the thought of being wanted by Yoh.

Feilong favours him with a contemplative look, the one that says he knows Akihito is trying to be strong again, to appear impenetrable and tough but it's entirely unneeded.

"Akihito." Feilong takes Akihito's face in his cool hands, pulls him close enough to focus on his dark eyes. "I cherish everything that you are."

Akihito blinks hard to clear his vision but it's useless. It's the same love he feels, the same unshakable pillar he's offered Feilong, the same steadying gaze. Whatever happens, happens - but here, in Feilong's arms, there will always be a soft place to land.

* * *

 

Their adjoining rooms are already booked at the InterContinental and they have reservations for dinner any time after seven-thirty at NOBU on the second floor, which makes Akihito rightly think that there's a conspiracy with _somebody_ making phone calls and plans behind his back while he was off spinning in a teacup with Tao. They order the omakase and skip dessert since Akihito is a mass of nervous energy wrapped up in roasted nori and doesn't need any more sugar.

Feilong holds Akihito's hand outside the hotel room to calm his nerves, but it just makes Akihito notice how clammy his hands are, and how warm Feilong is by comparison.

"You can still change your mind now," Feilong tells him. "Or any time you like - just come over."

By the time Akihito finally works up the courage to enter their suite, Yoh's running a bath with the door wide open. He's kneeling next to a jacuzzi with a window behind it, Victoria Harbour pretty as a painting, and Yoh meets his eyes reflected in the glass as the water steams up to a blur. Akihito's not sure what to do but to leans up against the door frame to ogle Yoh crouching there with nothing on but a pair of jeans.

"I thought you could use some warming up," Yoh is saying, holding out his hand, his voice echoing off the tiled walls.

It's been twenty-six celcius all day and Akihito's fingers are ice cold. Akihito takes Yoh's proffered hand, feels himself tugged and takes another step closer, "Do you want a shower?"

Yoh's smiling down at him, warm and so close Akihito can feel the heat off his chest, and he wants to follow all the scars crisscrossing Yoh's chest with this tongue, but he's still unsure whether he's allowed to make a move first, or if he should leave everything up to Yoh. As though reading his mind, Yoh leans in close to Akihito's ear and asks, "Why don't you get in the shower with me?"

Yoh's scars don't exactly go all the way down. There are multiple white lines on the outside of his legs, deep cuts, wide in the middle and tapering out at the ends inches long, and a pale faded thing that rips jaggedly across his left hip. He catches Akihito staring and offers, "That one's from climbing a fence when I was a kid."

Akihito takes a hand towel and touches it to Yoh's shoulder. "Can I wash you?"

"Go ahead." Yoh watches him, leaning up against the wall, the waterfall shower above them raining down a stream of warmth.

Akihito follows the sloping edges of Yoh's muscles with the cloth, starting from a line that goes from the bottom of his ear, over the back of his shoulder and the wide bulge of a bicep. He doubles back to smooth over the pectorals, daring to lick over a nipple when the temptation becomes too much. The cloth swipes over his well-defined abs and a bullet scar, and Akihito looks down, sees how Yoh is half hard, and decides that's not interested enough and sinks down to his knees.

"May I?" Akihito asks, his hand with the cloth goes over one hip to wipe over the thick cord of muscle there, following the underside of it until the cloth rests between Yoh's legs.

"Let me just-" Yoh reaches over to the wall, turning off the shower. His voice echoes dark and resonant over the glass door and the tiles, and Akihito wants it hear it lose control. "Do whatever you like."

The recessed lights in the ceiling illuminates the rivulets of water running down the groove between Yoh's pecs, and the tracks they make on the underside of his scars, glimmer like cut glass. Yoh's eyes are hooded dark above him, his eyelashes surprisingly long and casting shadows over his cheeks as he breathes out softly with lips parted.

Akihito licks at the sac and draws what he can into his mouth, laving the flat of his tongue over increasingly tight, drawn skin, but it's only a little while, a few minutes at most, before Yoh's pulling him up, mumbling, "Come here," and Akihito instinctually obeys. Yoh wraps an arm around him, just tight enough, tipping Akihito's chin up for a kiss.

It's not any less mind-blowing than their first or their second kiss. Akihito feels his soul leave his body when Yoh pulls back, pressed up hard against him, Akihito's arms flung over his neck mulishly tight. His cheeks are hot as he stares up into the dark pools of Yoh’s eyes, and sees how Yoh _wants_ , too; how Yoh’s hard and the shape of him feels like a far too wide and too long line over Akihito’s stomach.

"There's lube in the gift bag by the door," Yoh says as he's urging hot kisses to Akihito's jaw, soft open-mouthed affairs, all of him absolutely addictive. "What do you want to do?"

Wherever Yoh touches him paints Akihito with heat, makes him want to make a list and do everything on it, so much that a night isn't enough. He's hanging his weight all over Yoh, "I don't know," he mumbles, but it does embolden him a bit to be asked, so Akihito starts doing what he's wanted to ever since the first time he saw Yoh without a shirt on - he walks his fingers over the scars to map them with the pads of each digit, memorising them by touch.

"We can do anything you want," Yoh gives him that smile he does when it's a day off and Akihito points to a small village in the New Territories in a map book; an old pocket of timelessness with an uninterrupted view of the sky, and Yoh would drive for an hour without complaint.

'Anything' is too broad, and his brain demands some narrowing down. "Anything?"

Yoh tips back against the wall, breathing heavily, letting out a soft grunt as Akihito kitten licks over his chest, scrapes his teeth over a nipple, circling his tongue over the hardened nub. He nearly loses his footing when Yoh asks, "Do you want to top?"

Akihito has only ever been intimate with one other person, and Feilong's never once made that an option. Once it's on the table though, Akihito can't think why he hasn't thought about it, until he does. "But I've never done that before."

"It's not rocket science." Yoh's smile is permissive and warm - it gives Akihito feelings, most of them feral and wild and makes his dick twitch against Yoh's stomach. Yoh laughs, "I'll go get the bag."

Their steamy bathroom is redolent with vanilla and faint spices by the time Yoh returns with the bag in hand, as Akihito takes the time waiting to light the pillar candles by the jacuzzi. Yoh sees him and turns off the lights as he strolls towards Akihito, his skin golden in candlelight and the lines over him pale and glowing, his hair dripping, pushed away from his face, showing all the sharp panes of him. Akihito feels possessive, proprietary if only for a night for the man who's offered himself, and he beckons Yoh into the water.

Akihito goes into the water with him, on top of him, crawls and straddles Yoh to kiss the tiny, barely noticeable scar over his left eyebrow that's usually hidden beneath a fall of fringe, trails his lips to his ear notched like a tomcat that's been in too many scraps. There's a running catalogue here of history he means to ask later, but now it's about the sighs he draws out of the man beneath him, the darkening eyes, the trembling of his limbs as Akihito reaches beneath the water behind his balls to lightly rub two fingers over the tight furl of his opening.

"Turn over," Akihito mumbles quietly into Yoh's shoulder.

It's so much harder than he thinks it should be to have Yoh at his command, with complete freedom to do whatever he wants. Yoh gives him such an approving look before he turns, bracing himself against the edge of the tub with his shoulders high and the perfect arch in his back, graceful and inviting, the well-defined lines of his strength drawing curves that lead down to where Akihito has hands over the dimples in Yoh's lower back. Akihito approaches, tentative. Herests a moment between Yoh's shoulder blades, before leaving soft bites over the knots in a shoulder, marking with ardent kisses the winged shadows of his shoulder blades and the rhythmic dips in the knobs of his spine. Akihito murmurs as he palms over the lobes of Yoh's ass, his thumbs just brushing in closer, and he's not even sure what he's asking for, only that he wants more, wants the soft panting he hears to get louder, wants to feel those strong, hard muscles spasm in his hands. "Can I?"

Yoh decides to put an end to that line of questioning, sounding flatteringly out of breath, "I did say we can do anything you want, didn't I?" The profile of Yoh that Akihito catches, cheek flat against the counter, is dewy misted over with a sheen of sweat.

There's a blush spreading down from Yoh's cheeks to his neck, tantalisingly heated, and it seems a fine time to do what Akihito's been wanting, to spread Yoh open with his hands to press an open mouthed kiss to his entrance, where the skin is soft and pink and tight, and push his tongue inside. That sudden, cracking moan he tears out of Yoh is mellifluously sweet, echoing, and Akihito swirls his tongue around the edge, wanting more. He thinks he can lose himself in this, lick his way in until yoh's a gibbering mess. Yoh's thighs, wide as tree trunks and riddled with scars, are quivering and making ripples in the water, his cock heavy and drooling as Akihito runs fingertips over the shaft.

Yoh is gasping, his mutterings inarticulate; all his words garbled and out of control, turning into continuous moans interspersed with shouts when Akihito gets greedy, wraps his arms around Yoh's hips to hold him still to tease, traps Yoh's cock in the cradle of one palm.

"Akihito, ah," he says, in warning, in desperation, hands clawing at smooth marble and getting no purchase, "if you don't stop I'll -"

Akihito wants inside of him, but he wants Yoh undone by his tongue, wants him falling apart in his arms even as his own cock jumps in response to Yoh's words. Instead of stopping, Akihito pushes a finger at his opening, and Yoh takes him in easily, expectant and soft and makes him nearly regret the waiting. But Yoh's already allowed him this much, he’s given over control of his body for Akihito to please, so Akihito keeps his touch light on the crown of Yoh's cock and strokes, fills the silence with the light splash of their movement in the jacuzzi and Yoh cussing in three different languages and the wet obscene slurt of Akihito's mouth.

Yoh is hard all over, the kind of warrior body Akihito thinks must be his type, but when Akihito looks up at him now, over the curves of his ass, he sees the twin bow of Yoh's shoulders as his head drops forward, the perfect dip in his back rounded and soft in candlelight. It's heady and makes a rush of need wind up tight in his belly. Akihito crooks his finger and closes a warm hand over Yoh's cock, makes a twisting motion just below the head, feels Yoh clench up tight and his voice reverberating through the bathroom as he comes, his voice tight and sweet and choked with staccato breath. It’s music to Akihito's ears.

Desperate to see the look on his face, Akihito licks a line up Yoh's back, leans over him, still stroking him, and milks him to the last drop. It's worth everything to see him wild, glossy-eyed and panting, to suck marks into the side of his neck as his body trembles.

"Can I keep going?" Akihito wants it so much he aches, but he's fine with waiting, as long as he gets to hold Yoh in his arms - Yoh resting on his folded arms when they wouldn't hold him up any longer, Yoh looking sideways at Akihito through his fringe that's fallen down again, Yoh wet and still softly panting beneath Akihito.

But Yoh doesn't ever say no, not when he knows Akihito truly wants something, so the light smile tugging at his mouth is strained but real when he says, "Anything, remember?"

Akihito thinks his cheeks must colour, but he stops everything just long enough to coat two fingers in lube and carefully thrust back in. Yoh's so tight he squeezes Akihito's fingers together, clamping down so hard it hurts. "Okay?"

"Wait," Yoh says, and Akihito knows how it probably feels, burning anew every single time. Akihito waits by him, one arm wrapped over his torso and leaning close enough to watch the minute changes in his face; the vulnerability he allows as pain fades to dull ache. "You can keep going."

They stop and go and Akihito takes ages fingering him, forever, too long, until Yoh's looking back at him with irises all overtaken by pupils after Akihito works in a third digit, breathing in small doses. "I think that's enough."

Yoh's scars seem to glow as heat rises and adds colour to them, and they’re so sensitive to the touch that he sighs when Akihito bends down to lick at the hollows in his lower back. He wants Yoh's arms looped around his neck, so even though he's a little nervous still, he asks, biting his lip, "Can you turn over?"

They sacrifice a pile of towels on the mess they already made on the counter, and Yoh leans back over the mound of it, bracing himself against the edge, and unabashedly spreads his legs. With cum splattered on his abs and his hair slicked back with water and sweat, his head tips to one side and his shadowed stare focuses on Akihito, intense and erotic. Akihito thinks he could lose himself just by looking. With shaking hands, he rolls on a condom and squeeze out too much lube, but he's lost the rest of his nervousness now at Yoh wearing nothing but want on his face. Akihito braces a hand on the counter next to Yoh, guides himself in with another, and he meets Yoh's eyes as he sinks inside that first agonising inch and feels an animalistic snarl rise in his own chest before he hears it, and it takes all his self-control to not rush forward and take, to devour him whole.

Akihito thinks he must be holding his breath until his thighs meet Yoh's ass, and he takes that deep breath and falls forward at the same time, rests both hands on either side of Yoh's hips. It's hot inside, too warm and soft and tight around his cock, still impulsively clenching down in that entry pain.

"Is this okay?" Akihito asks as he nearly pulls out, and pushes himself back in slowly.

"You're doing fine," Yoh says, strained and breathless. He rests his weight on one arm so he can touch Akihito's cheek with his free hand, and he pulls Akihito closer until their foreheads are touching.

He's too close to focus on Yoh's face but he feels the pulse through his skin, sees the unfocused moisture on his eyelashes and the pink glow through his cheeks, and he's just at the right angle to look down at where they're joined, how Yoh's cock twitches when Akihito slides in. Akihito feels something in his throat loosen, the uncertain lump fading out as he's becoming more confident in how he moves in Yoh, how Yoh clings to him with one arm, his need for assurance all flung at Akihito. It's good, more than bodily need, and more than fulfilling a fantasy. It's knowing he can give pleasure as well as take it, that there is no shame in taking, that Yoh is masculine and beautiful and hard and soft all at once and he is _more_ for it. It's easier than to dig his thumbs into the thick cord of muscles above Yoh's hips and get into a rough rhythm, listen to Yoh sound off the tiled walls, singing out his pleasure for Akihito alone.

Yoh's looking at Akihito with naked need like wildfire, unafraid to leave his control at the door, and he gets louder, tighter, baring everything as Akihito wraps his hand around Yoh's cock, thumb and index finger not quite meeting, stroking over the crown and down again.

"I can't hold out much longer," Akihito admits through gritted teeth. The temperature probably hasn't changed, but he's covered in sweat, the tell-tale tightness in his balls coming on fast.

Yoh's staring right into his eyes looking as wrecked as Akihito feels. He has both arms looped over Akihito's neck now, elbows bent and resting on Akihito's shoulders and he's hoarse, throat all dry from moaning as he orders, "Don't you dare stop."

There's no choice but to tug at Yoh's cock more urgently, to wrap his fingers around him tighter. His rhythm's just about to falter when Yoh grips him incredibly tight and shouts, back tight and curved back impossibly and his blush spreads down his chest, pulling Akihito down into him as he loses control over all his raw strength. Yoh's luminous and absolutely gorgeous the way he comes apart, his chest heaving and glistens in flickering light, the slick making it easier for Akihito to pump him faster, tease him where it's already too much. Akihito's fallen flat against Yoh's chest, and now they're close enough for Yoh to kiss him, so he does, surging forward messy and slanted, hungry sweet. It's into that mouth that Akihito moans, speeds his thrusts to lose himself at last in the shuddering, gripping warmth of Yoh all around him.

Of all times to feel shy, Akihito raises his head from their kiss and he's overcome with it, his cheeks tingle as Yoh looks at him like he sees right through him. Yoh give him one light, chaste kiss on the lips, as if to reassure him.

Akihito feels as if he's just jumped off the tallest building and floated down to land on his feet - perfectly impossible, everything so bright they hurt his eyes, including Yoh in front of him, who’s ridiculously handsome with soft, mirrored flames dancing on his flawless cheekbones and Akihito can't believe what he's just done.

"That was wonderful," Yoh says softly, his arms still around Akihito, and maybe he's a little shy too, his cheeks are flushed and he stares out through the fringe of his lashes, but his words are validating and strips some of the shyness away.

Akihito answers that by returning the hold, digs his arms into the pile of towels so he can wrap himself around Yoh's waist, bury his face in Yoh's neckline and holds tight until his arms tremble. He doesn't ever want to let go, but the counter is made of marble and there's no give at all, so it's for comfort that they eventually peel themselves off of it and back into the shower.

The urgency has left him, at least. He doesn't feel like a starving man at a banquet, so Akihito doesn't panic when he has Yoh in his arms to kiss slow and heated against the wall in the shower even after Yoh turns it off.

When they finally make their way to the bed, Akihito watches as Yoh lights up a cigarette, and traces Yoh's scars with a fingertip, he can't stop touching him. He marvels out loud, "I can't believe you just let me do that."

"It's not 'I just let you do that,' it's 'we did that,' but okay," Yoh corrects him, matter-of-fact, "And why wouldn't I?"

"Because you're so, um," Akihito searches for a word, and feels stupid when he can find any, so he settles on, "tough?"

"What does sex have to do with putting a bullet between a man's eyes at 400 meters," Yoh laughs, and it's sharp and pointed at Akihito, maybe meaning to hurt.

It makes him feel too young, inadequate, and Akihito doesn't know what to do with that except to hang his head a bit. "Nothing."

"Good," Yoh playfully pinches Akihito on the nose, "It's alright."

Akihito knows Yoh well enough by now to know his flights of fancy are so short-lasting that most probably don't even notice them; he has dry as bone humour and likes mild practical jokes, and they juxtapose too well with his heartbreaking sincerity, the nearly loving gestures that gnaw at Akihito's heart, little pains. There's this too: simple and unvarnished, words cutting Akihito's assumptions apart.

It's obvious that this love worrying at Akihito's rough edges, the soft-cloth buffing of him until he shines.

"But if you must know why-" Yoh stubs out the last half of his cigarette in the ashtray and props himself up on one elbow, turning so Akihito can see him. "That was me being selfish."

Akihito voices his confusion, "How?"

"I should let you forget me." Yoh's smile is the one he wore on top of the ferris wheel, tinged with enough sadness to hurt. "But I guess I'm more attached to you than I thought. That was the first time you topped - and I wanted it to be with me."

That's dumb, not as if he can ever forget Yoh - his first real crush, one that blossomed into anything like love. Maybe it's true what Feilong thinks, that Akihito's just a chick imprinting on the first person to care for him with such attention, but it's etched in him so deep it has to be real.

"I could never forget you." Akihito gives shape to the thought as he takes Yoh's hand to weave their fingers together.

Yoh brushes his lips over Akihito's knuckles, feathery light, "Perhaps not. But you'll fall in love again."

Right now, in this very moment that seems like an impossibility that’s as far away as distant planets, and Akihito vehemently shakes his head with his eyes firmly closed. Yoh takes Akihito's face in both hands and repeats, "You will," pressing kisses to his forehead where it tingles.

"I don't want to," Akihito doesn't want to hurt forever, but he doesn't want to forget, either. "I don't want to get over you."

"Maybe not now." the way Yoh looks at him is special, his eyes kind and unmasked, the precise reason why Akihito wishes he can stay, to settle in that indulgent love that makes him feel spoiled. "I just want you to be happy."

"What about you?" Akihito asks.

"What about me?" Yoh seems puzzled.

"When are you going to tell him you're in love with him?" Akihito asks point blank with three inches of space between them.

"Never," Yoh says.

"Why not?" It's dangerous, and unprecedented for him to get stuck on a personal question instead of letting it go, but it's about Feilong so Akihito feels he wants to push. "It's not like he's with anyone."

Yoh's locked up his emotions instantly so Akihito can't really read him, not that Yoh can be read at all day to day. "I don't have the right."

"Is this one of those 'he's the son of a prestigious family and you're a commoner' thing?" Akihito thinks maybe Feilong would stand on tradition, but Yoh's a definite catch for someone who can barely make tea for himself.

"Something like that." Yoh is being cryptic. He gives Akihito a warning look to not push - and Akihito doesn't.

"That is depressing." He makes a face instead, and thinks for a moment before asking, "How long has it been?"

Yoh rolls onto his back and stares up at the ceiling. "Five years."

Akihito punches Yoh in the side. "And you're telling me I'd fall in love again?"

"You're twenty-one. I am older than you and set in my ways," Yoh says, plainly changing the subject, giving Akihito that affected condescending talking-to-a-child smile that is imminently punchable.

Akihito is always up for some taunting regardless of what's on the other end of it, even when he knows exactly what he's getting if he tempts fate. "I guess you're too old for another round?"

Most of the time, Akihito forgets that Yoh is the most dangerous person he knows - faster and stronger than Feilong, and by far a better shot - but it's because Yoh lets him forget it. Yoh doesn't let him forget it now, as he pushes Akihito down on the bed with a searing, soul devouring kiss, his hands pinning him down by weaving their fingers together. It's seconds before they're both hard again, trapped between the heat of their bodies, and Yoh's considering him, his sharp eyes agleam behind narrowed slits, his grin lopsided and full of teeth.

"You sure you want this?" Yoh's burning hot on Akihito's stomach, and though it's a valid question, it's flagrantly dumb because Akihito can't help himself, his hips have been grinding up against Yoh since they began kissing.

Maybe he's tired of all this kid glove treatment, at the way Yoh handles him like something too dear to risk breaking, since Akihito chooses to go from sweet kitten to full-stop bratty in about a second. If he can have Yoh for only one night, Akihito wants all of him. "Bring it on, old man."

Yoh's grin widens, and there's an added ferocity behind that knowing gaze that lets Akihito know he's removing all the brakes. "Oh, you are going to be so sorry you said that."

"As if," Akihito says, pulling Yoh closer for a kiss that quickly turns into rough, open bites down the side of Akihito's neck that has him arching his back.

"Remember that I'll stop any time you ask me to." Yoh's worrying at a spot at his nape that drives Akihito mad; he swears it's connected by a single nerve to his cock. "Alright?"

"Fine." Akihito rolls his shoulders, exposes his neck, pulls Yoh so tightly to him that there's no space between them at all, and waits for Yoh to take everything he could want. "Just don't hold back."

* * *

 

They're back in the bathroom after Akihito lose track of time - rather, losing track of everything. He can't remember how he got here or where he is, even his own voice sounds strange echoing off the tiles, too rough, too hoarse, his throat hurting from calling out.

"I can't," Akihito cries out between keening, and he's pretty sure he's crying. There is coolness on his cheeks where his tears have made tracks.

His arms feels soft and weak as they rest looped over Yoh's neck, his hands slapping against Yoh's back as Akihito's pushed against the wall on every thrust. He has one leg flung over Yoh's arm and his knee is by his ears and he thinks he can't possibly come again but Yoh has other ideas.

"Ask me to stop, and I will," Yoh says, barely winded, the line of his lips, the sharp cheekbones that borders him look absolutely ruthless.

"No no, no." Akihito pushes his heel into Yoh's back, no strength to hold him closer but he wants to try, to make him stay. "Don't."

Akihito's already come twice since Yoh managed to fit inside of him, so wide it pushes all his thoughts aside, and he feels himself rearranging on every stroke, changing shape to become someone else entirely just to fit himself around Yoh. The first one came suddenly and without warning after riding him forever, hands behind his back gripping Yoh's thighs so he can't touch himself, and Akihito learns that he can come with his dick untouched if he finds the right angle with the right pressure and work at it long enough, with Yoh whispering encouragements while cradling Akihito's jaw with one warm hand. The second time is with Yoh pushing him face first into the bed, legs pushed close together so Yoh feels even bigger than he already is, every push of him inside slow and careful and brutally relentless, grinding another orgasm out of him with maddeningly long thrusts that Akihito can feel all the way to his ribs.

"Then I won't." Yoh's smirking down at him, and Akihito's not sure why he ever thought Yoh's a nice person, that he's the most lovely person Akihito has ever met, that the sun rose and set in his eyes, because Yoh is a fucking bastard, and deserves all the cussing Akihito's been throwing at him in both the languages he knows.

There's no room in him for anything but Yoh, the line of his smile and the flash of his eyes ferociously bright in the darkening bathroom after one of their candles drowns. His hands are stroking up Akihito's cock too lightly, but he's too sensitive now so anything harder would hurt, so he's trapped in high arousal, floating right on the edge.

"Why won't you come already," Akihito mouths at Yoh's chin, tasting salt and the rough touch of stubble. How late it must be.

"I'm close," Yoh says, the liar - he said that an hour ago. "But I want you to be closer, first."

"Kiss me," Akihito demands, tangling his fingers into Yoh's hair. He tries to bring Yoh's shoulders closer ineffectually with his elbows.

Yoh scrapes him light on the lower lip with his teeth, sucks on it and distracts Akihito as he rearranges them, pushing both of Akihito's legs so he's all curled and pinned. Akihito complains loudly at the loss of Yoh's hand on his cock and Yoh just smiles, the monster.

He's about to whine some more when Yoh catches his lips, open-mouthed and languorously sweet, but it's only for a breath that Akihito thinks of it, so, for in the next minute, Yoh's speeding up and fucking him in earnest finally, Akihito helplessly folded and pinned against the wall, entirely at his mercy. It's hard and fast and it cores him out, his mouth a silent 'O' with Yoh licking at his lips, sucking on his tongue and filling him up all over. Akihito goes slack with an orgasm practically wrenched out of him, coming with his shoulders and his legs shaking, clenching down hard and seeing stars from pleasure so past exhaustion it hurts. Yoh drops his head to Akihito's shoulders and lengthens his thrusts, pulls nearly all the way out before pushing back in, but Akihito doesn't let him escape. He kisses Yoh on the cheek, on the side of his mouth until they connect, until Yoh's moaning into him, his hips stuttering to a stop.

Akihito's half delirious with fatigue and unable to move a single inch, but the way Yoh moans into him with short little huffs of shuddering breath is good enough to eat the way it vibrates through his lips.

Akihito feels - and is - entirely drained, yet he still whines when Yoh pulls out of him, slowly, letting his body adjust to the loss. Yoh fills him up again, with soft kisses to his chin, to his jaw, and he clings to Yoh's lips that swells his heart, his own personal endless reservoir.

They've gone to bed together; and now that it’s over, miraculously, Akihito feels whole, perfectly intact, his heart is in one piece. And the first thing he says when he comes down from post-coital high is, "I'm not sorry."

Akihito's saying this as Yoh sluices shampoo out of his hair for him while he has both hands on a rail for fear of falling on his ass since his legs have given up on him, so it's not convincing at all.

"If you can walk from here to the bed without holding onto something, I'll even believe you," Yoh laughs with such brightness that Akihito's tempted to forgive him.

Akihito decides that if he must hold onto something, Yoh can be it, and goes from the rail to Yoh's waist for balance. He rests his head on Yoh's chest, the expanse of it wider than his own shoulders. "I don't know why I love you."

Yoh combs back Akihito's hair and covers his hairline with soft, gentle kisses, and Akihito knows that he's just told a lie - he knows perfectly well why. "Where do you want to sleep?"

Akihito is, at heart, a greedy little thing when it comes to affection, so naturally he wants to sleep with both of them in the same bed, tucked securely in the middle. And he's quietly snoring within minutes.

"You wore him out," Feilong says, petting Akihito like a cat.

"He called me an old man," Yoh points out in the same tone he uses to consign underlings to wet market duty. "And wearing him out may just be a birthday tradition now."

Feilong makes a humming sound in his throat in agreement, and strokes Akihito under the chin. Akihito just clutches Feilong's hand tighter and smiles into it. "Look at him, he's so ... happy. Why don't you just date him?"

"Do I get a say in this?" Yoh grins all the way up to his eyes. "And you know very well why. He'll figure out himself soon enough."

It's less noticeable than what he sees in himself, but Feilong thinks Yoh's changed too; he's warmer, the edges of him softer. Yoh still asks too little and works too much, but Feilong hasn't heard him laugh until this past year. It reminds Feilong that Yoh is human, even if they're both also weapons.

And when he smiles, Yoh is rather handsome.

Feilong thinks he may be staring, and quickly places the attention squarely back on Akihito. "You don't think he's in love with you?"

"He thinks so. I'm not going to deny him that." Yoh places a hand over Akihito's shoulder protectively. "But he can't say no to me ever, and that's ... let's say if he feels this way about anyone else, I wouldn't want him to date _them,_ either."

Feilong agrees, "Idolising someone can lead you to dark places," and he should know.

Their eyes meet in the dark over the sleeping form of Akihito, chest rising and falling in a steady beat. And though Akihito's brought them closer, it's still a stretch to meet like this. Feilong thinks this change between them may just be permanent.

"Are you sure about tomorrow?" Yoh's looking at him, or at them, his expression as always inscrutable.

"Asami asked me the same thing. The answer is still no." Feilong pulls the blankets over them - it is four in the morning. "If I cut your heart out and keep it somewhere six hours away, would you be okay with it?"

A year ago Feilong felt trapped in his own body, living forever on a rainy day. Now he can claim to have a heart and it does not taste like irony.

He has his back to the window - Hong Kong is bright at 4am, and the light from Victoria Harbour falls across the ocean into their room, into their little pocket of time. It lights up Yoh's face just enough, looking above Akihito at Feilong with a look of deep sentiment. It’s a glimpse of something heavier than what he usually shows, that Feilong's only caught a few times over the years they've spent together and never this long.

It makes him feel ridiculously young, a little crack somewhere in his chest heralding the birth of something new.

"You sound like a parent," Yoh says, quiet over Akihito's head of blond hair, reaching over to cover their hands with his.

* * *

 

It's too bright and too early when Yoh shakes Akihito by the shoulder to wake him. Akihito's had maybe three hours of sleep, tops. His legs are still wobbly and he won't be able to sit down properly for another twenty-four hours, but Feilong's gone and Yoh's tossing an overnight bag onto the bed and shoving a coffee in his face.

"What," Akihito says groggily, at least less hungover than last year - there's that. "Why am I up?"

"Get dressed." Yoh, who's already dressed all but for his tie, looks perfectly awake and refreshed and doesn't look like he's walking around with a sore ass at all, the bastard. "You have thirty minutes."

"I don't want to." Akihito hides under a pillow and whines. "Let's take a day off."

"It's supposed to be a surprise." Yoh pulls the blankets and the pillow away and replaces them with a coffee Akihito's not ready for. "If I tell you anything, Feilong will have my head. Get. Up."

Akihito's not sure how he feels about surprises - he knows he's supposed to like them. Almost everyone likes surprises, but he's had too many birthdays coming home to an empty house waiting for hours for something to jump out at him before the excitement inevitably fizzles. Though, in the past year he's become accustomed to Feilong whisking him off somewhere cooing about a surprise, and aside from that one surreal trip to Tiger Balm Theme Park that gave him literal nightmares, (that entire estate, what the actual fuck, why) Feilong's surprises weren't very surprising and usually involved food. So even though getting up is uncomfortable and he wants to sleep another eight hours, Akihito dresses in minutes and is bundled into the car within thirty.

They've been this way before on a trip to Lantau Island in Yoh's black town car, stumbling on fishing villages with lines of hanging fish and pans of pungent shrimp paste drying in the sun. The Northern side of the Island is just as sparsely populated as the Southern side, and the road drops off sharply to their right, ocean separated only by a thin railing, with steep mountains and trees on their left.

They're in the limo where Akihito can kneel on the seat and paste his face on the window, with Yoh's hand on his back because he's a worrywort and always will be. The ocean is wider and stretches farther than his view in Kowloon, but these days the water feels less like an impassable barrier and more like a bridge he isn't yet ready to cross. The smog doesn't reach them here, so the sea sparkles bright as dancing diamonds. Akihito chatters about framing and the viewfinder limitations in capturing a horizon such as this; a view that cannot be contained, one that loses all its essence in anything less than panoramic wraparound.

Hong Kong's been like that for him, an expansion of aspect ratio beyond four-by-six, beyond rules of threes and right into the three-sixty - into the boundless projection of three dimensional. He may go back to Tokyo but the view will no longer look the same.

Akihito thinks he'll always be looking beyond the surface, peeling away the skyline like a wire to let it expand into the depth it deserves.

As the iconic glass covered buildings loom closer, the niggling hints the past month presented begin to stack up and fall. Akihito feels at the end of a chain of dominoes, and can hear the distant clack one after another. Yoh is taking his hand, showing a uniformed man Akihito's tattoo and Akihito's getting shunted through a series of glass doors and mostly empty corridors, dragging his day-bag behind him, chasing after Yoh's back.

It's not until he's in front of a private jet with SION Corp. painted on the side that he breaks down; all the weight of his loss, the thought that _this is home, and I'm leaving_ falling on him at once. He throws himself into Yoh's arms - one last time.

His tears are hot soaking through Yoh's crisp white shirt, snot probably running down the suit, he'll need to dry clean everything, but Yoh is warm and his arms are solid, mooring Akihito where he thinks he may just float away.

"I hate you both." Akihito's sure he's laughing and crying at the same time. He wipes his nose on Yoh's shirt for good measure. "You're terrible people. This is the worst surprise ever."

Akihito buries himself in Yoh's chest, closing his eyes to the heat assaulting his temples with what's sure to be a crying fit, so he doesn't see Yoh's face when he speaks, but his voice is hoarse and thick, and the arms enclosing him are tight, but not too tight, as though Akihito is the most precious thing Yoh's ever known.

"Happy Birthday, Akihito."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Apollo - is a Japanese book store in Kowloon.
> 
> Non-No, Grind and Ollie - are all Japanese fashion magazines geared towards men in their 20's and maybe early 30's. (Akihito has the Men's Non-No.)
> 
> The floating restaurant - Jumbo Kingdom is a Hong Kong fixture. It's been around since the 70's and it is THE BEST THING. You take a junk and float your way to it. Akihito would love it.
> 
> Ocean Park - I am not following the map. Artistic license. :p But the rides are real.
> 
> Tong lau - old Hong Kong apartments, usually less than five stories high, with no elevator. When you see pictures of old residential Kowloon, you're usually looking at Tong lau. Tong as in Tang dynasty, lau as in building. Tong is like … old chinese. Tong-hwa is another word for “Cantonese.”
> 
> 21 - The age of consent in Hong Kong between two men was 21 right up until 2005. I mean, Yoh’s talking about some VERY naughty movies that aren’t even government rated, in *cough* special theatres.
> 
> NOBU - high-end Japanese restaurant in Kowloon at the InterContinental.  
> omakase - "leave it up to you," or a menu where the chef chooses your menu, usually a series of very small dishes. 
> 
> Tiger Balm Gardens / Theme park - actually got torn down in the late 90’s, good riddance. It contained the chinese depiction of hell in all its glory with murals and sculptures and istg it was built to scare children into obedience.
> 
> * * *
> 
> This chapter is set to the song [追光者 (Chasing the Light)](http://foxghost.tumblr.com/post/168773609533/%E6%B1%AA%E8%98%87%E7%80%A7-%E8%BF%BD%E5%85%89%E8%80%85-one-who-chases-the-light-chorus-im)  
> I couldn't find a translation I was happy with so I just translated it myself. The link is to my tumblr.


	7. 情 (qing) - Extended Epilogue

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> 情 : qing : feeling; emotion; passion; situation
> 
> 激情 : ji qing : Passion intense and presumed short-living. Literal: the pressure of water gushing out from a small place + the word for feeling.
> 
> Summary: Asami spends six weeks convincing Takaba that a) he has a sense of humour, b) he is really not that much of an asshole, and c) becoming entangled with the biggest crime lord in Japan is a feature, not a bug.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Remember when I said the epilogue was 13k? I meant 17. And [Green_Destiny](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Green_Destiny) beta-ed it like a champ.

Someone at Sion has a sick sense of humour, because there's a tall megane either dressed for murder or a day at the office holding up a sign with TAKABA AKIHITO printed in deep red on white cardstock, bordered with a series of pink and red hearts, standing stone-faced at: Arrivals, Haneda International.

Due to security concerns, he hasn't been a Takaba for a year. Akihito reads it out loud, getting familiar again with the shape of his name. It's good to be back. Takaba pulls his arms through its sleeves, the lines and ink spots of kanji on so many court documents, and though he's grown a bit out of it now it feels like appropriate armour for strangers and this unfamiliar stage.

"Nice boss you've got there." Takaba spots a twitch at the corner of the megane's mouth. Muscle spasms pass for a smile in Asami's organisation, where apparently everyone is repressed.

The megane introduces himself to be Kirishima Kei, executive secretary cum bodyguard to the CEO Asami Ryuichi, whom Takaba already knows to be an asshole who leaves friends with gunshot wounds in hospitals without visiting once. And now he can add sadistic fuck to the list of labels because this is what sadistic fucks do to their highly paid secretaries on Monday afternoons: make them pick up friends of friends from airports, armed with embarrassing placards.

Kirishima’s carrying two briefcases, one of which belongs to Takaba with all his ID and travelling papers that he did not need. If Takaba has learned anything from being around Feilong, it's that borders and laws don't apply to the ultra-rich (or presumed) walking off of private jets. The briefcase feels like a life in its entirety in his arms though, and has a comforting, reassuring weight, so Takaba possessively hugs it all the way to wherever the hell they're going in the black limo with its tinted windows and diplomat plates.

This is how Sion does things: cold and expedient. Takaba has a 2LDK condo in Jingumae, Shibuya-Ku, fully furnished. Everyone's already been called to inform them of his arrival, including the apprenticeship he can start tomorrow if he so wants. There's a smartphone in the briefcase to replace the one he's lost and a black credit card in his new wallet that has no limit.

Then Kirishima drops the bomb and Takaba wishes he hadn't got on the plane in the first place and honestly, he's had it with terrible people having terrible friends and Takaba's not sure what that says about himself.

"I'm what?" Takaba explodes across the cab, gets right up in Kirishima's face and doesn't flinch when the megane reaches into his lapel for what he knows must be a gun. "I must have heard you wrong. Do please say that again."

"Officially, you're Asami-sama's mistress," Kirishima faithfully repeats what he's already said, same tone and cadence and everything, making about as much sense as he had the first time.

"Explain." Takaba's sure his smile's entirely hysterical but it's got to be a joke on him, and he'd just _love_ to hear the details. "How exactly am I officially a mistress for anyone."

"Everything you own in Japan was procured under Asami-sama's name, and the ownership has been transferred to you," Kirishima explains, and it gets worse by the second. "Your parents weren't in the country so he's the guarantor on all your new identification, and most importantly, the Yamaguchi-gumi has been informed of your - _importance_ to Asami-sama, and will not be pursuing their previous vendetta against you."

"Thank fuck for that," Takaba mutters in Kirishima's face. "Can I do without the rest."

Naturally Kirishima is executive of nothing related to Takaba, can't make any decisions to his claims that he doesn't need Asami to buy him a furnished condo or to carry around Asami's credit card, and they're going to bring Takaba 'home' to his new place where Asami's waiting for them so would he please calm down and stop half-sitting on Kirishima's lap, it's horrid optics and bad for his heart.

Takaba's not sure how Asami's managed it, but his new place in Jingumae is amazing, decorated exactly how Takaba would have right down to the mugs with cat paw prints in the kitchen and the character pillows on the couch. It's also a skip and a hop from everything; a five minute walk from Gaienmae Station on the Ginza line, tellingly close to Ni-chome and there's a supermarket on the same block.

He's not exactly hot on the whole Asami Ryuichi in the kitchen thing, making himself coffee with a chemex and pouring it into one of his paw print mugs like he owns the place.

Scratch that - Takaba would be quite happy if Asami could go on owning the place and he can find a more suitable apartment elsewhere without a weapons kingpin in it.

"Asami Ryuichi," he introduces himself, looking very handsome, immaculately groomed, impeccably dressed, reeking of old money, and utterly, completely clenched, as though he's perpetually holding up a 1-yen piece by the ass cheeks.

"We've met," Takaba says, trying not to sneer - they've met at an unofficial staring contest in an elevator, which Takaba will contend that he won.

Asami isn't phased by the continued staring contest. "Coffee?"

The kitchen takes on a quality of normality with _thank you_ and _please_ that any room with Asami Ryuichi in it does not deserve, as Takaba is Asian and doesn't have a mode for turning down food or drink. Takaba adds too much sugar and cream and glares over the mug as Asami silently judges.

Kirishima stands stock still by the door between the kitchen and the living room and waits to be dismissed, glasses shining and far too intense. Tabaka thinks there has to be an over/under at the Sion offices on the likelihood of Takaba flipping his shit and throwing coffee in Asami's face, and maybe he should want in.

"About this apartment -" Takaba's about to say he's going to stay here for maybe a month while he looks for something else, but Asami starts talking mid-sentence.

"Do you like it? Feilong went through a whole stack of real estate listings before settling on this one. He even flew here this morning to put in the finishing touches." Asami trips off the first guilt landmine, followed closely by the second, "Yoh chose all your furnishings out of a Nitori catalogue himself - down to the coasters."

"He's here?" Takaba laughs, he must sound deranged, but what else is there left to do. "I'll let them know I love it."

The corner of Asami's mouth moves up, smiling a marionette smile, one who controls his own strings. He reaches in his jacket and pulls out a pack of Dunhills, walking towards the living room presumably for the balcony. "I'm just going to step out for a bit."

"Sir," Kirishima intercepts him physically with an arm across the door, "This is the fifth floor. It's not secure."

There's a near imperceptible droop in Asami's shoulders that he covers up with a quick turn to Takaba. "Do you mind if I smoke in here?"

"Yes," Takaba's response is terse and immediate and _scandalised_.

A frozen sort of silence hangs for a bit as Kirishima looks at Takaba with a horrified sort of awe, and Asami's eyes go wide for a second before he settles for downright amused, "I'm glad you're feeling ... proprietary of your new home already."

Takaba thinks this is why Asami looks perpetually clenched, he feels the need to have the last word all the fucking time, and needs to suck the air out of a room to get the upper hand even over a nobody like him.

Before Takaba can make a moue to convey all his disgust, he jumps out of his skin when his new phone starts ringing the Doraemon theme song. He stares at it for a full five seconds, and figures out too late that Asami's going to get back at him for all the names he's called him behind his back, especially the part where he said the man was constipated.

"You fucking asshole." Takaba pushes past Kirishima into the living room and rages at his innocent phone - the only innocent party in the room. "Why are you not here right now."

"What if it was your dad." Feilong sounds giddy, on the edge of a giggle-fit, like he's pulled off the best prank on Takaba - oh wait, he _has_.

"My dad has common sense and wouldn't gift me to a Japanese crime lord on my birthday." His dad also wouldn't call him on his birthday, but Asami is within earshot so he goes for insulting both of them instead.

"It's the other way around, you know," says Feilong.

"That's amazing, how sweet of you, _you shouldn't have_ \- where's the gift receipt," Takaba snaps.

"I'm sorry Akihito. I dragged you into my world." Feilong actually puts on sincerely apologetic, a combination Takaba can't resist. "And this is the only way I know to protect you."

Damn Feilong for being both right and drastically wrong in the same breath. Takaba's more than just some kid the Yamaguchi-gumi was targeting now, he's pet-on-transfer from the Dragon Head of Baishe to the head of the entire underworld in Tokyo and if that doesn't paint a bigger target on his back, he doesn't know what would. (Possibly if he starts taking telephoto shots of the prime minister meeting with human traffickers.)

"Ugh, fine," Takaba sighs, changes gear. "Thanks for the condo. I love the framed triptych of Infernal Affairs posters on my bedroom wall."

The condo is a labour of love, everything from his old storage lockers have been put away in the storage units, the pantry is stuffed with his favourite snacks, stocked with all the sauces and basics to throw together any sort of meal he may want. There's even an entire box of Nissin in chicken flavour at eye level with the labels in Chinese - the kind of absurd export-reimported that only Feilong would attempt.

The three posters of Yoh's clone in his bedroom, Takaba can do without.

"Do you really?" Feilong asks as if he can't detect sarcasm over the Sea of Japan.

"No." This is nice, almost familiar sniping - he misses Feilong already. "It makes me look like a fanboy."

"Name an Andy Lau movie you haven't seen."

It takes Takaba too long. "God of Gamblers 3."

"He's not in it," Feilong laughs.

Takaba makes a choking noise, "I think I'll move it to the hallway."

"It's on a picture rail, so you can slide it," Feilong says, casually conversational like they're still talking about movies. "But it's hiding a gun safe so you may want to hold off moving it for now."

"Choi," Takaba spits, "Diu lay lo mo puk gai ham gaa caan." Which is entirely juvenile, being what every elementary kid in Hong Kong learns by the time they’re in grade five.

"Tao's done a terrible job raising you," says Feilong, ignoring how Takaba’s just indirectly cursed himself, and proceeds to explain to him how he's actually living in an armoury disguising itself as a condo, down to the location of every weapon hidden in every single piece of furniture, as Takaba exhaustively run through his entire Cantonese dock worker vocabulary.

And as Takaba paces and cusses on his phone in the living room, Asami Ryuichi is leaning on the door frame sipping his coffee, a genuine expression of glee never leaving his face. Takaba, who’s too busy wrapped in his head still with overwhelming information and too little sleep, misses this entirely.

* * *

Takaba is technically two digits older but feels a lot like he's aged ten years. His photography sensei asks if he's been taking classes the whole year, and how he's handling the equipment like he's never left them. In reality, Takaba has read all the Japanese photography books he could get his hands on at Kowloon's Apollo, the equipment he has tucked away in his dragon hoard of a second bedroom is as good as the professional studio's.

Takaba starts a blog and makes one-a-day posts of his backlog of tilt-shifted Hong Kong photographs; his miniatures of hawker streets and typhoon shelters and crumbling mansions that he came across in the New Territories. The walls of his condo are mostly bare with waiting picture rails, but he hasn't hung up a single print. Even looking at them on a screen fills him with unnamable longing, his heart beating in every end spiral of the golden ratio reminding him to come home.

Since Asami is likely a stalker at heart, he follows Takaba's blog and favs every post personally within a day. It's creepy and adorable that Asami wants to leave the first comment, and they're always insightful, praising the way Takaba frames a shot or the quality of the light he manages to capture or the beauty of its specific focused pane.

It's not usually an issue that Takaba has his nose stuck to his phone half the day, but he's sitting in an Izakaya across from his new place with Kou and Takato so it would be kind of rude to answer his text from Hong Kong, or to tap the notification that his photo's been commented on, so Takaba settles for fidgeting with a bottle of soya sauce, rolling it between his hands.

Kou's staring at him like he's grown cat ears. "Aki - did you get a girlfriend?"

"I've been back in Japan for two weeks." Takaba finds the perfect excuse as his order of shashimo arrives - he picks up his phone to snap a photo and posts it on Mixi, and doesn't notice that he grins when he thinks he's surreptitiously checking the comment. "Where would I find the time."

"Shut up, Kou." Takato always comes to the rescue when the subject of girls come up, being the kind of insightful friend that doesn't ask questions when Takaba ditched events like year-end dances back in high school.

There will always be things to run from, but Takaba is tired of running, tired of shoring up that last wall. He's known these two since kindergarten; their presence has shaped him, kept him from wallowing in the crippling loneliness of an adolescence in an empty home.

Lying to his friends was easy because he was also lying to himself. After all he's been through, it all seems rather silly.

"I don't have a girlfriend, and I will not be getting a girlfriend." Takaba sets his phone aside, places both hands on the end of the table for support. "Because I'm gay."

Kou chokes on his nitsuke. Takato nods, "Okay."

Eventually, after much patting of his back and narrowly escaping a heimlich maneuver, Kou says, "Congratulations. I guess I should buy the next round."

Their responses are anti-climatic and entirely predictable, but Takaba hasn't even imagined how this would have turned out. He’s been too scared to think about it, so he's not ready at all for the relief flooding through, punching chinks in his armour where he least expects.

Two beers and a series of hugs later, Takaba thanks his friends for putting pieces of him back into place, and Kou asks a question he can't really answer, "So ... was that your boyfriend's messages you were checking then?"

"Ugh," and Takaba’s about to come up with a series of excuses but his phone starts pinging with urgent sounding texts, so for now, he runs.

_Shashimo is not a meal. Order some vegetables. - Yoh_

_I just came out to my friends !!! - TA_

_Good. Get a beer to go with the kinpira. Which you will be ordering. - Yoh_

_You're not going to ask how it went?????? - TA_

_I'm sure it went fine. They're your friends. - Yoh_

Takaba wakes up in the morning feeling lighter and happier than the two weeks he's spent in Tokyo since coming back from Hong Kong, or rather, he's feeling less burdened by secrets than he ever had in Tokyo. He's crashed out on the top of his sheets with all his clothes still on, the impression of a phone on his cheek, and no memory of how he got home. The last call in his phone history reads _incoming from Yoh, 1:06 am, duration 22 minutes_.

* * *

Officially, Takaba is dating Asami for six weeks until they can stage a public split so he'll remain important enough to be left alone and not nearly important enough to get kidnapped weekly. They head out once a week to some fancy gallery opening, a theatre premiere, choice of political or charitable fundraiser where Asami plays reputable businessman philanthropist and Takaba pretends he's not gagging over Asami's act.

Asami takes him to dinner at Sion on their first date in the VIP section, where half of Japan's white collar criminals can pretend not to be gawking at the both of them over their drinks; the CEO with some waifish boy in casual designer clothes and sporting a Baishe tattoo prominent on his wrist.

"What are you doing?" Asami (32) is apparently unaccustomed to the phone habits of the young, namely, taking photographs of food and posting it to Mixi before eating it.

Takaba could have made up any number of excuses, one of which is _everyone's doing it_ , but he doesn't want to sound like a teen so he goes with the truth, "I post pictures of my meals on Mixi because Yoh will nag me about not eating properly otherwise."

Which, Takaba realises immediately, makes him sound like a child with a helicopter parent, and in a horrified moment of realisation, he thinks it may be the most accurate description of his relationship with Yoh he's never thought of, and he turns five different colours in as many seconds. Asami, meanwhile, is hiding his grin behind a fist trying not to laugh, but he can't hide the crinkling of his eyes nor the particular angle of his neck as he leans on the table with one elbow, and somehow even though the smile shows more lines on him, all the fine details of a life hard lived has smoothed out. For once he looks younger than he is, more alive than Takaba has seen, and Takaba thinks for the first time that he is momentarily transfixed.

After dinner, Asami stays at Takaba's condo until two in the morning as planned, making the rumour stick. Takaba's not sure why he has to hang around for a minimum of five hours, likely due to his overinflated ego. (Heaven forbid word gets around that the great Asami Ryuichi only last two hours in bed.)

Instead of bringing his work and spending all his time in the second bedroom, Asami elects to haunt Takaba in the living room to silently judge his choice of evening entertainment. Having been warned in advance by Kirishima that this outcome is the most likely, Takaba puts on the sappiest, most embarrassing dorama he can gets his hands on, courtesy of Kou's new girlfriend he wouldn't shut up about.

That's how they end up marathoning Hana Yori Dango after their first date sitting on opposite ends of the couch.

"That is so unrealistic," Asami says at the end of episode two, having been silent the entire time.

"What is unrealistic? That rich people are assholes? Or that Makino couldn't possibly have made it into Eitoku - or do you mean her mother waking up at 4am to make lunch - oh, you know what, explain," Takaba babbles when he's nervous.

He's alone in his condo with Asami Ryuichi and he's very, very nervous.

"If you fall on someone and your mouths crush together, you'd both end up bloodied, maybe missing front teeth," Asami explains, overserious. "Even if you like things rough you wouldn't call that a kiss of any sort."

It's fucking adorable how Asami's actually analysing a ten o'clock idol dorama for plot holes, and Takaba curls up on his end of the couch and laughs until his stomach starts hurting. He wipes the tears from the corners of his eyes and gets out between giggles, "Really? That looked pretty gentle to me."

Asami's perched at a forty-five degree angle to Takaba from his corner of the couch like a coiled snake, and Takaba's not sure why people think of amber as soft, because Asami's eyes are bright amber and as hard as the edge of a blade. "If you want to know what a rough kiss is like, I can show you."

It's got to take him half a minute to refuse. Takaba loses the time caught like a proverbial deer in headlights, eventually stammering out, "I'll pass."

"Pity." Asami steals the remote out of Takaba's hand, trails the tips of his fingers slowly and meaningfully over Takaba's palm.

Then he plays episode three.

Takaba's imminent normal life is so close he can see it without a telephoto lens, and yet he finds himself mulling over possibilities he shouldn't entertain due to the obvious pros and cons of becoming too attached to Asami: the pros being probably good sex and the cons being a list so long winded it falls out of frame. He whine-texts Feilong about Asami's blatant boundary issues, to which he gets answers along _what are those_ , and _is it bad_.

He has surrounded himself with assholes in possession of zero personal awareness, and Takaba doesn't want to examine that too closely, for fear of becoming too self-aware.

* * *

Having no awareness of how obsessed he is still, Takaba lines up all three Infernal Affairs movies and opens a six pack of Tsingtao after their second date, pushing a green bottle emblazoned with a pagoda into Asami's resisting hand.

"Don't look at me like that. I lived there for a year and got used to it." It's a good beer, dammit.

He's talking too fast again, all his babbling sentences running together since halfway through dinner, and even if the alcohol doesn't help, it'll at least give him excuses.

"There's nothing wrong with the beer." Asami cracks the cap with his lighter - like a thug - and takes a swig before gesturing the mouth of the bottle at the DVR. "I thought we were going to finish off the last four episodes of Hana Yori Dango."

Takaba sort of wants to know if Makino dumps Doumyouji's ass because he so deserves it, but he already knows that's not going to happen because idol doramas are written as wish fulfillment, something about girls with hearts of gold being able to mold terrible men into some semblance of civility, if not outright princeliness. He's too shocked at the moment at that particular configuration of words coming out of Asami's mouth though, so he doesn't admit how invested they both are in the stupid predictable show and just says, "Next time."

Every time Andy Lau appears on screen making his stoic face doing the glare thing, Takaba brightens up like the fanboy he denies to be. (And will deny to his deathbed.)

Takaba notices halfway through that Asami’s not really watching, that half of his attention is on studying him, "What is with you and Inspector Lau Kin-Ming."

"I have no idea what you're talking about." Takaba tears himself away from the movie long enough to roll his eyes at Asami, but he has literal posters of the movies in his bedroom sometimes keeping him up nights and he's terribly bad at lying to some people. "Watch the movie."

"Uh huh," Asami grins, licking his canines and all but demanding Takaba pay attention to him instead. "It's kind of cute."

Takaba has had two beers so when he throws a beer cap at Asami, it sails uselessly over his head.

Most of the way through the third installment, they're on their second pack of Tsingtao and Takaba's on his fifth beer and the movie fades into a series of background gunshots reverberating off interminable parking lots. Takaba's curled up like a cat on his end of the couch, his legs all tangled up with Asami's, unwary of their closeness, mind a haze and warm under a cashmere throw Yoh shipped over when Takaba asked him where he got something so soft. It smells like him; Yoh had decked out the condo down to the laundry detergent.

He's been thinking about Yoh all night, misses him terribly, an ache a lot like homesickness, not helped at all by five and a half hours of a lookalike on his huge TV.

"We should get you to bed."

Akihito hears a voice as if from a great distance as he's lifted, the crush of a crisp shirt wrapped over a solid chest pressed to his cheek. The fabric fills his senses with cigarettes, gun grease and black powder, the worked leather of well-worn holsters, and Akihito instinctively curls into it, relaxing in the hold.

"Yoh," Akihito mumbles, filled with alcohol and butterflies and yearning, buoyed by illimitable trust. "I want to sleep in your bed."

The bed is missing the stink of Tiger Balm, but the hand stroking his hair is large and calloused in all the right places and more than makes up for it.

When Takaba wakes up at noon, it is in his bed still wrapped in a cashmere throw and to fifteen missed calls on his phone set to silent, fourteen of them Feilong.

"Where's the fire," he says, fuzzy and tired around the cotton of his mouth.

"What did you do to Asami?" Feilong sounds chiding.

As if Takaba is able to do things to Asami that is in any way objectionable without maybe a gun to the face.

"I have no idea I just woke up I had -" he checks the empty bottles on his side of the coffee table, "five beers." Takaba rubs at his temples, which pounds with every syllable Feilong utters.

"You're such a lightweight," Feilong says like the hypocrite he is, probably even _more_ of a lightweight, which is half the reason why they drink together in the first place. "Asami is harassing Yoh."

"What?" Takaba doesn't even think those names go together, especially not when such a verb is involved.

"He's been texting Yoh non-stop," Feilong says, and there's a pause, a ping in the background of someone getting texted. "Why does he want to know what aftershave Yoh uses?"

"Beats me." Takaba only vaguely remembers the night before, draws a blank after the fourth beer. "If he keeps this up for more than a day I'll yell at him, okay?"

Some time in the shower in the middle of jerking off, Takaba does remember, and loses his erection entirely with abject third person embarrassment over his drunk self.

Takaba washes his hair savagely, with too much shampoo and scalding hot water, but he cannot scrub away the memory of Asami's hand in his hair, the tingle in his scalp at the touch of his fingers, nor the comforting weight in his bed that he moved towards, where he found dreamless sleep in the warmth of light sandalwood and musk all tangled up in familiar smelling clean sheets.

* * *

Their third date is nearly an insurance write off, cleaners are involved and Takaba's door locks have to be replaced - what an utter shitshow.

Takaba gets home from the studio an hour before Asami's supposed to pick him up. Thirty minutes prior to their date, in the middle of throwing a tie Yoh left pre-tied in his closet over his shirt, his video intercom goes off.

It's some shady guy in a pizzeria baseball cap apologising about ringing the wrong apartment, but Takaba spots the white shirt with every button done up, catches a visual whiff of general shadiness, and by the time someone shoots the lock off his front door he's in the second bedroom walk-in closet (AKA the panic room) with an oxygen mask on, double fisting spray bottles of methoxyflurane. The security camera feed playing on a monitor shows three goons walking in looking rather shocked. Out of sheer cheek, Takaba's choice of masking music blasting through the recessed speakers is Utada Hikaru Single Collection Volume One.

If there's one thing Feilong's good at, it's planning for eventualities, so Takaba hits the hidden panel on the wall that sends an SOS to Suoh - Head of Security at Sion - and waits with the closet door cracked open. The mask gives him thirty minutes, which is way more than the twenty it takes for anyone to get to him from Shinjuku, but Takaba doesn't want people dying in his home, feels rather protective of the place, so he sprays the door down with evaporating nerve agent and like an action game with shitty AI, the goon walking in sniffs the air and Takaba catches him before he has a chance to break his nose all over the floor.

According to Feilong, handcuffs are for amateurs, because even a fetus like Akihito can get out of them, so it's no surprise that he's stocked Takaba's closet with zip-ties. Takaba zip-ties the guy and leaves him in the closet, rolled to his side so he wouldn't choke on his own vomit. He's counting that as good deed of the day.

The second goon is smaller but wary with his gun pointing straight out, both hands on the weapon like he's watched too many American flicks featuring the FBI, so Takaba plays dead in the living room and waits. Takaba doesn't curl up when the guy kicks him gingerly in the side, sees out of the corner of his eye as the gun's lowered, the stance relaxed, before kicking the weapon out of the goon's hand and throwing all his weight behind an elbow, right for the Adam's apple.

There's no time to tie up the short guy in the living room, but he's appropriate bait, so Takaba sprays down the goon's suit and sits next to the door frame, where at least he won't be immediately seen. Then it's only a matter of time before the third one walks in, predictably concerned, predictably checking his partner's pulse, predictably taking a deep breath when finding out said partner has a pulse, and then predictably falling over from inhaling nerve agent.

Takaba digs his cellphone out of his camera bag and calls Suoh on speakerphone as he zip-ties the two men, "Everything's under control, but I've got some packages for you so bring three golf bags." Then he remembers that he doesn't really want a fainting Suoh in his house, and adds, "Oh, and wear a mask for methoxyflurane."

Asami shows up at this door as Utada Hikaru sings the English lines in First Love, track 4. He must have broken a dozen laws to get here this fast in late rush hour traffic.

"You could have waited for backup." Asami looks distracted, his bangs falling all over his forehead, bloodless and defiantly maskless in the overhead lights of Takaba's genkan.

He's staring, and it takes a moment for Takaba to remember that he's sitting on the half-step in his underwear because his clothes have volatile nerve agent gassing all over them and he's left them lying discarded in the hallway. He looks up from hugging his knees and watches as Asami's focus shifts to Takaba's chest, where the old bullet wound has long since turned into a faint white star.

The panic fades in like a tidal wave, and Takaba's glad it's hitting him twenty minutes late.

Takaba tries a laugh, and it comes out tremulous and too high, "And have these guys bleed all over the place, no thanks." He combs a hand through his hair, style flattened out by a gas mask and sweat. "They tracked dirt all over my house."

To Takaba's surprise, Asami follows along, "What, they didn't take off their shoes?"

"Terrible guests. Just awful." Takaba's likely still high on adrenaline, can't stop smiling like an idiot. "Very rude."

Asami takes off his suit jacket, walks across the genkan in two steps, and kneeling, drapes it over Takaba's shoulders so gently the fabric falls over him like a whisper; warm from Asami's body heat, the silk lining a smooth caress. He half expects Asami to kiss him, he's come close enough, but he just leans in until their foreheads touch, where they can feel one another's pulse, skin to skin, Asami's heartbeat strong and steady and rabbit fast.

Takaba's not sure what's expected of him. He pulls the jacket closed over himself, and the corner of a packet of cigarettes in the inner pocket scratches into his chest and a loose flap of fabric - the pocket's ripped - brushes Takaba's skin. When he looks down he sees the line of Asami's nose, his mouth pursed tight, one of the straps of his gun holsters flipped over from pulling them on too quickly.

"I'm glad you're alright," Asami says, quietly and unmoving, his breath ghosting over Takaba's chin smelling heavily of smoke.

Suoh's security team walks through the busted door wearing gas masks within the next minute, and Takaba reluctantly shake himself out of the ironclad serenity they've created, to let the team know where he sprayed chems so they wouldn't try to scrub the whole place.

It's only been thirty minutes since someone shot his door, and Takaba thinks he wants a place to lie down but needs his phone, which is forgotten on the living room floor. He needs to call a cab, get a hotel room, and go some place where armed thugs won't come through his door. But his head is an agglomeration of fear and leftover excitement, dizzying vertigo of having a gun pointed in his face and still being alive.

"Come stay at my place for the night," Asami says.

"Can I trust you?" Takaba asks, apprehensive, clutched by the paranoia that tends to dance along with adrenaline high. His hands are starting to shake; maybe they've been shaking all along and he'd only just noticed.

"Have I not been a perfect gentleman?" Asami's looking at Takaba with that full-attention smirk, too intimate, too close, too soon, always making Takaba feel the need to bolt. "Who tucked you in when you begged to sleep in _daddy's_ bed?"

Takaba makes a strangled sound, but it's like a bowstring being plucked, all that tension strung tight through the past thirty minutes vibrating out of him in a moment of extreme embarrassed catharsis. When Asami takes him by the hand to lead him into an elevator out the back door to a waiting limo, Takaba doesn't think about how he's not really dressed, just that he wants to be as far away from the break-in and the people lying on his floor as possible.

Asami pushes a drink into his trembling hand, and Takaba only gets more anxious, his mind awash with Feilong's memories of Asami, overlapping with his own, forming a double exposure.

"You are a lot more reserved than I thought you'd be," Takaba says, huddling in the back corner of the limo. Whiskey isn't nearly as strong as baijiu, but it burns a line of fire down his throat all the same; this time he knows he has no sins to burn away.

There's at least an arm's length between them so he really shouldn't be so jumpy, and he has a feeling Asami's actively trying not to look threatening by taking off his holsters and setting them aside before pouring himself a finger of whiskey.

"And what have you been told about me?" Asami sounds curious.

"I heard you won't take no for an answer," Takaba says, and when Asami narrows his eyes and turns cold, he doesn't back off. There's a difference between real danger and what Asami would do to him, and he's used up his quota of real fear for the day. "Did Feilong threaten to cut off your balls if you touch me or something?"

"Or something," Asami agrees, tips his head slightly. "He told me you can handle yourself. After tonight I'm inclined to believe him."

Takaba chuckles a little, "I only got them because I fought dirty."

"You fought to win." Asami raises a very valid point, "What other way is there?"

"I don't know any other way," Takaba laughs, a touch apoplectic, thinking of how things may have ended up if he'd chosen to fight _fair_.

It's a twenty minute ride from Takaba's condo in Aoyama to Asami's somewhere in Shinjuku outside rush hour, and it's still light out and life teems beyond the boundaries of this limo, millions of them on the other side of this world he's fallen into. Takaba thinks he belongs there, in the light, camera slung around his neck and ducking into and out of alleyways. To get there though he needs to walk past Asami - slip by him and pretend his existence isn't like the black hole in all his photographs, the inevitable and mysterious out of focus point that draws the eye.

Takaba's not sure if he still can.

"Tell me, Takaba," Asami swirls the amber liquid in his heavy shot glass, fixes Takaba with a considering, heated gaze. "If I jump you right now, what would you do?"

"I'd crack this tumbler I’m holding off your bulletproof windows and stick the jagged end into your jugular," Takaba says without hesitation.

He's not sure if he can get away anymore, but he's sure going to keep fighting it - to the bitter end.

Over dinner, only the past week, Takaba had shown Asami a new photograph taken from the roof of his apartment, a shot of Aoyama from high above at night, light trails racing through the streets in slow exposure. Asami had told him it was _beautiful_ and the way he'd looked from the photo to Takaba's face had been too much, approaching adoring so uncomfortably that Takaba had shrunk back into his chair, mumbling overly humble refusals.

"Vicious," Asami purrs now, in the same voice, the same tone, the same cadence; his eyes, half-lidded, are still too fond.

Takaba downs the entire tumbler of whiskey in one go, and rubs at his cheeks ineffectually as a red tinge rises in them, the soft tingling of heat taking ages to dissipate.

* * *

He thinks maybe he hears Feilong, or Yoh, or both, unrecognisably enraged, compressed into the tinny speaker of a cell phone, just audible in the silence of a hushed room in the dead of night, as Takaba falls into listless sleep in one end of Asami's strange overlarge bed and Asami fields phone calls sitting on the opposite edge.

The rest of that awful night's a blur, adrenaline distorting time and distance, shifting his focus to strange details; Asami's fingers holding a cigarette, limed in moonlight, a corner of the nail of his pointer uncharacteristically chewed; the back of the same fingers stroking over Takaba's cheek, tender and light, how that nail snags Takaba's hair as the sky turns the fishbelly white of dawn.

Takaba insists on going home the next day, and the lock's already replaced, all traces of dangerous chemicals scrubbed from the premises, two guards posted at his door 24/7, and probably a tail he can almost spot following him wherever he goes. But it will be days before he stops jumping at phantoms, and weeks before the condo starts feeling like _his_ again.

* * *

Takaba signs up for two languages courses at the same time, figures he may as well learn Mandarin and English on top of Cantonese, hoping maybe he has the same talent for languages that his father does. Those take up four evenings a week. Add in two evenings with his friends and one with Asami and he never has to be alone with his thoughts in his too large condo again.

They have an odd fourth date, full of doled out little secrets and mostly Takaba's childhood stories, sitting shoulder to shoulder at Sion's backroom bar, tucked into a corner location, semi-public.

Asami swirls his bourbon to watch the liquid spin after dinner as if auguring their future and saying quietly, "When I was 9 years old, my father started a rumour among the servants that he was a pedophile in order to make me take my studies seriously."

Which isn't something you just lay on someone on the third date. (What are boundaries?) But Takaba's jaw just drops to the floor and he has a million questions, so whatever Asami is trying for, it's _working_.

"What - how - those two things do not compute." He leans in voluntarily into Asami's personal space then, his hair brushing the herringbone waistcoat before tipping his head back, finding Asami's gaze slanting down at him. Takaba pushes, curious, "Make some sense."

"I'll tell you the rest of the story on our seventh date," Asami just smiles, small and private.

Takaba hunts down a bootleg of Meteor Garden subbed in Japanese for their hours on the couch, for no other reason than pretty people on the poster and a plot so old and tired that he can probably understand it even without subtitles. Also Jerry Yan is really cute in that shaggy haired, rough on the edges way Takaba is terminally susceptible, which explains but does not excuse Asami's jealous fit most of the way into episode three.

On the screen, Jerry Yan is forcing a kiss on Barbie Xsu, and off the screen Takaba is clutching onto the cashmere throw for dear life to hide his highly inappropriate reaction. The night has so far been a syzygy of fucked-up suspension bridge effects: the closeness between them that's not at all easy going, heart-palpitations from being in his apartment mere a week after he's taken down armed assailants not a meter from the couch, and now too much tension on his tv screen. Asami chooses at that moment to take the absolutely worst lesson from rotten, terribly written media, and prowls over Takaba like a big cat, palms him between the legs, covers his mouth with the rough kiss he's offered the last time, but this time without the asking.

It's rough, searing, not at all like how Takaba's ever been kissed, not at all how Takaba perceived kisses to be; Asami has Takaba pinned to the armrest by the hair, his mouth closing down with too much force, his tongue in Takaba's mouth questing, drawing him out, and the feeling is of one being consumed alive.

Takaba tries to turn his head but it's not possible, he'd rip out his hair first, and he tries pushing at Asami's chest but he's not budging one bit, so Takaba goes for the kill and wraps his hand around the back of Asami's neck and pushes the edge of his thumb into the middle of Asami's carotid artery.

That got his attention. Asami pulls away long enough to stop palming Takaba's erection and goes to hold his wrist down instead. "You really _are_ vicious."

"I need you to stop," Takaba says, lets his left arm (the free arm) go slack to reach the edge of the couch.

"Do you now," Asami's grinning down like a big cat to a mouse, playing with his prey. His eyes are fever crazed, a golden gleam between dark lashes. He frots Takaba with a muscular thigh, finding him hard and straining in his jeans. "I don't think so."

"I am telling you to stop." Takaba looks him straight in the eye, livid, so angry the pulse in his temple is audible as a continuous beat of rage in his blood. "I don't want it. Get off of me."

Asami just does it again, twists his hips to rub the top of a thigh over Takaba's hard-on, "You'll change that tune soon enough."

Takaba whips his left hand out from under the couch, and a wire with a heavy metal tail falls over the back of Asami's neck, the momentum looping it as the pendulum swings. Takaba catches it, holds both the twin tails in his hand, rolls it over his own wrist and pulls to his left in one smooth motion. It leaves Asami no choice but to let go, to try to get his hand between the loop, but it's too late. If he tries to move Takaba's hand away, he'd just strangle himself.

"I'm hardly some helpless rent boy you picked up off the street." Takaba has him, has both hands free, and he tightens the loop until it bites but doesn't cut, yet. "Now get out of my house."

Their bodies are still pressed tight and Asami refuses to let go of Takaba's hair and they're hard, Takaba's heart beating faster with the rush of having Asami's life in his hands. Asami's still looking at him like he has the upperhand, like a garrote around his neck fucking turns him on, and he takes that look and turns it into words, follows a guttural growl with, "You're just making me want you more."

"Take a number," Takaba scoffs. "Get out."

He'd rather walk five minutes over to Ni-chome and pick up some random dime-a-dozen beautiful stranger. It'd be a quick fuck, no guns attached, and they'd leave the same night and not make Takaba bait for thugs that shoot locks off his front door. Bonus: whomever he picks will likely take no for an answer.

Asami is still full of himself - still smug as anything, but he does follow when Takaba tugs the garrote and starts walking him to the door using it like a lead.

Even after Asami's put his shoes and his jacket on again, Takaba's still shaking with anger, holding onto the end of the wire like a lifeline as it hangs by his side.

Asami's fixing his collar, a red noose bitten into his neck just above it. "How long will you hide just how much you want me?"

"Long enough. Are you going to go or do you want that public splat to be in the obituaries?" Takaba stares at the red line Asami won't be able to hide in June, and thinks there must be something wrong with him because it's arousing - like he's staked his claim.

As if he knows exactly what Takaba's thinking, Asami raises his hand and follows the line with a finger, grinning, unrepentant. "I'll see you next week."

It takes Takaba approximately one second after the door closes to lose all his fight, and lets himself hit the wall and slide bonelessly to the floor.

That could have gone better.

* * *

Takaba blocks Asami on his blog and ignores all of his text messages the next day because while he's perfectly capable of lashing out against violence, his default position when faced with kind words or any semblance of heartfelt apology is to cave immediately. He asks Feilong if he'd mind very much if he killed Asami by accident and gets mixed messages: _Should I be worried?_ and _No, I'll kill him myself if he gave you cause_ and most unhelpfully _Did you use the taser or the garrote?_ likely because a small, hidden part of Feilong is a sadistic killer who wouldn't mind seeing Asami hang from the ceiling fan for funsies.

Yoh, ever the practical one, calls him for clarification. Takaba's all too happy to complain all about it.

"Do you like him?" Yoh asks, after Takaba wears himself out raging.

"No. Yes," Takaba sighs, rubs his hair so hard he pulls out a few. "I don't know."

"Akihito." Yoh has that tone: _don't lie to me_.

"Alright alright, I do like him, but I don't want to be _stuck_ with him," Takaba admits.

"You were never afraid of being stuck with Feilong. Or with me. What makes him different?"

"He's terrifying? He's too -" Takaba flails. It's hard to find the words for all Asami is, what Asami makes him feel; like getting too close to a flame, fascinated and yet knowingly touching it means being subsumed.

"Too?" Yoh prompts, after a solid fifteen seconds of silence.

"Too close." Takaba thinks he's found it. "He gets too close."

"And that terrifies you somehow?" Yoh says, and there's a long pause. Takaba can picture Yoh's gesture on the other line, pinching the bridge of his nose and sighing before he says, "You need to figure out what you're afraid of."

"But -" Takaba starts to protest.

"I'm not saying that what he did wasn't unacceptable. It is not acceptable for him to treat you that way," Yoh adds, "Feilong just offered to put a hole in his head."

Takaba calms instantly, feels the tension drain out of his shoulders. "What do I do?"

"Whatever you want. But, the next time you have to be alone with him," Yoh says, and there's a hint of mischief Takaba catches, can practically see the edge of his mouth quirk up, "bring a taser."

* * *

Takaba's burning rage has faded to a simmering indignance by the next day, but the makeup team he usually gets along with is giving him a wide berth. Apparently Takaba's looking so dark in the face it's bad luck to be near him. One of sensei's assistants, Yuki-chan, asks Takaba if he's had a fight with his girlfriend. Takaba's phone keeps ringing and the screen flashes _don't answer this_ , which is what he's changed Asami's number listing to, and then comes a series of texts he also ignores. When the front desk calls him to pick up a package, Takaba's expecting a shipment of photo paper and instead gets a dozen red roses, choked all to hell by baby's breath.

Asami Ryuichi is woefully incapable of feeling apologetic; the tag attached to the flowers says _I won't be making that mistake again_.

Since Takaba works in a building in Ni-chome, nobody bats an eye as he carries the flowers in, and Yuki-chan gets him a vase and coos over Takaba's sweet boyfriend. An hour later he gets another two bouquets, both tagged _answer the phone_ , and the makeup guys get in on the teasing, "If your man keeps this up we're going to run out of vases."

"We have like a hundred vases," Takaba says. There's a wedding photo studio in the building and an entire room dedicated to props. "And he's not going to keep this up. This is stupid."

Takaba thinks he must forever underestimate Asami's stupidity or rather, his admiration of dumb dorama protagonists who spends too much money on romantic gestures neither of them understand. The flowers keep coming: three dozens next, then five, then eight, at which point Yuki-chan figures out that Asami's sending them by the fibonacci numbers and warns that thirteen dozen roses is coming in the next hourly delivery.

Takaba pulls out his phone and dials _don't answer this_.

It's picked up mid-first ring, as though Asami has nothing better to do than to wait by the phone like a love-struck teenage boy, and Takaba says without preamble, "This is harassment."

"You should pick up the phone when I call," Asami says, like the tyrant he is.

By this time Takaba's commandeered an empty makeup room for the accumulating vases, and now he barricades himself in it, locking the door. "You attack me in my home, and now you're harassing me at work. That's not - that's not acceptable behaviour."

"Not acceptable," Asami snorts, dismissive. "By whose standards?"

"Mine!" Takaba yells into the phone, fit full of rage, only half Asami induced. "It's unacceptable by _my_ standards!"

He's red in the face, filled with impotent rage, mad tired of circumstances beyond his control. There's a makeup stool just by him, so Takaba falls into it, tries to rub away the prickling in his cheeks, the shrill ringing in his ears, to ignore the strange man that's his reflection with the angry, twisted expression.

"I was trying to calm you down," Asami explains, and maybe it's just Takaba's imagination that he sounds a bit chastised.

"It obviously didn't fucking work, you moron!" Takaba's been bottling it up all week already, spun up and locked away with nowhere to go, and he knows - knows well that his rage isn't even all directed at Asami, but he happens to be on the other end of the phone. "That's not how you treat people!"

He's not naive, he's well aware that people like Asami - people like Asami, Feilong, or Yoh - place people in different categories the way that Takaba chooses which is the subject and which is the bokeh. He knows that to Asami, some people are things; the same way Feilong teaches Takaba how to pull a man's face backwards by the nose or pinch the carotid sinus until a heart stops, or the way Yoh teaches him to hit the center of the target, pulling the trigger as fast and accurately as possible, because some people are not people and it's alright to stop their hearts from beating. Takaba can't do that, and he doesn't think he ever can, but Feilong and Yoh have always given Takaba the place of honour, made him the focus of their lives, treated him as family. Takaba is as sacred to them as their Triad oaths. Takaba can't be around him if Asami can't do something as simple as shift focus.

"It seems I've crossed a line." There's a sound from the other end of a body sinking heavily into a leather couch, followed by a long pause. "I'm sorry. Forgive me."

There's no _please_ in that. Asami manages to make a common phrase to ask for forgiveness sound like a command, but Takaba collapses on himself anyway. It's all he wanted, he asks for so little. "Fine. Apology accepted. Now stop sending me flowers."

"You didn't like my message?"

"You missed the one," Takaba says. "It's one, one, two, three, five, not one, two, three, five."

"I didn't miss anything. There's a golden ratio in every one of your photos, you frame so naturally," Asami says, and it's near reverential the way he seems to lean from the microphone, all the clipped edges of his consonants rounded smooth. "And you, the artist, are at the end of every spiral. I've simply surrounded you with roses."

Takaba wants to laugh, but all that comes out is a tremulous hiccup and something that's not quite a question, "Do you always try this hard."

"Never," Asami concedes.

This isn't a crush.

Takaba doesn't think it's ever progressed to a crush, there hasn't been a single moment where he looks up and realises he consciously wants Asami, and he still doesn't. It's not a longing or an ache, he does not yearn or pine or any combination of these things. It is the pull of the abyss, the unknown, a thing he does not know himself to be capable of, like he is dry tinder and Asami is a bonfire, and if he's any closer he would go up in flames, entirely subsumed. Whatever they can have can only eat him alive, there can be no easy companionship or gentle love, unpossessing - he can feel it in his bones.

Takaba is afraid; clutched by a primal, deep seated, horripilating fear as he is drawn like a compass to magnetic north.

It's the exact opposite feeling he had for Yoh, their fragile glass globe precious and light and crystal clear, surprisingly constant and unbreakable. This is tumultuous, tosses his heart as if he's on a wave, and Takaba's not sure if he can live there, on the very crest, knowing full well that the fall would crush him.

It is not about wanting, for no one wants to fall from the edge of a precipice into the darkness below; Takaba's barely hanging on the ledge, and he's not brave enough yet to let go.

"This is not part of the plan," Takaba says.

"I've never let that stop me."

"I want a life, Asami," Takaba says, however vain, there is that hope he can still live on the other side. "I want to - do things. On my own. Have a career. It'd be too complicated with you."

"Your life will happen. With or without me." Asami is full of confidence when he says, "But I can assure you that your life will be better with me in it."

To Takaba, one path does not look clearer than any other, but the road leading to Asami is entirely shrouded. "You sound so sure."

Asami seems to sigh, "Would you want your life without Feilong in it? Or Yoh?"

"Obviously not," Takaba says, but one does not go hunting for black swans. "But I didn't go looking for a gun fight. It just ... happened."

"I will give you everything you never knew you wanted," Asami says, voice soft over the line. It's the certainty that keeps Takaba strung tight, listening for every word. "I promise you will look back on this time and think your life incomplete until I came into it."

Takaba is surrounded by nineteen dozen roses sitting in neat vases, and he feels as choked as the roses themselves by by bundles of baby's braeth peeking out from between the petals; like white stars on a carpet of red, or scars in pools of blood. It's neither, it's both, and Asami's words are too - a proposal and a chain and too much unwavering promise.

"Give me time," Takaba says.

He gets a deadline. "Two weeks."

"And if I say no after two weeks, what happens?"

"Then things go as planned," Asami says, almost flippant. "I leave you alone."

* * *

Asami sends a car to pick Takaba up from work that night, knowing exactly when he doesn't have classes, and he sequesters the two of them in a quiet corner of the bar, shoulders touching, leaning in towards each other to speak softly for hours about nothing over softer music.

The pianist is riffing through the Utada Hikaru Collection Volume One, elevator music edition.

"I don't actually love that album or anything." Takaba's drinking melon soda, but he's effervescently giddy, a little drunk on the atmosphere. "It throws people off, you know? You should have seen their faces."

"Suoh mentioned it." Asami's been playing with a cigarette for ages, flipping it over his fingers, letting it hang from his mouth without lighting it. "I didn't even notice that your speakers were on."

"It was very loud. Very obnoxious." it's been a week and Takaba's staring at Asami's long, elegant fingers again, this time they're perfectly manicured. "How did you miss it?"

"My mind was elsewhere," Asami says, and the corner of his mouth quirks like a secret.

The way Asami looks at him, teeth worrying at the filter of his unlit cigarette, feels like a punch in the gut - taking away all of Takaba's air.

* * *

They abandon Meteor Garden entirely.

Hana Yori Dango ends the first season packing Doumyouji Tsukasa off in a(n) (air)bus, Takaba's least favourite trope in tropey manga turned dorama. Thankfully he has Asami to angrily munch on popcorn with and angrily gripe about the ridiculous nature of end-of-season cliffhangers.

"I have no words." Asami's visibly angry, and it's so much fun watching him get angry over an idol dorama Takaba's halfway tempted to pick something equally rage-inducing for the next three hours. "What was the point of all that? They face a series of external conflicts and is suddenly in love?"

"You mean, what is Makino and Doumyouji without conflict." Takaba doesn't know what to tell him, this is the introduction to dorama for Asami - poor man. "The answer is: Makino and Doumyouji are not a thing without conflict."

"That could get exhausting." There's literally a line between Asami's brows now.

This is so much fun. "Rui should have wised up sooner."

"What, so she'd end up with him?"

"Rui's nice. Makino should have ended up with him. He's sweet and considerate and takes care of her when she needs it. Doumyouji literally bullied into her life," Takaba prattles on, only noticing Asami's scowling halfway through his analysis. "Why does that make you angry?"

"I'm not angry," Asami mutters, the contours over his browline obviously angry.

"Whatever you say." Takaba pulls Ringu out of a dark corner of the media shelf. "Let's watch something you're less invested in, okay?"

Takaba's seen Ringu more than ten times, but it's riveting every time except this one; Sadako crawling out of a screen - backwards, rewound - may be art all on its own, but so is Asami's fingers just touching his beneath the blanket, twitching a tad whenever a new body is found.

It makes his heart race, the closeness and the artificial distance, the way Asami holds his body just out of reach, casually transferring his heat, every jump scare in the soft pulsing of his fingertips.

* * *

Takaba calls Yoh the night before the planned breakup, and pours out all his confusions in an unmitigated stream of consciousness flood rant. Yoh, ever patient, listens to every word and grunts occasionally in the verbal equivalent of nodding his head.

"You're not really confused," Yoh points out when Takaba finally runs out of words. "You just don't want to face what's in your head."

"There's too much in my head," Takaba sighs. "Elaborate."

"Well, to begin with," Yoh says, and Takaba thinks, _long suffering,_ "How do you feel about me now?"

Takaba hasn't really thought about it. "I love you?"

"Uh huh. But in what way," says Yoh. "Do I scare you? Do I make you feel confused? Do I make you angry, even? Do you feel jealous at all?"

"None of those things." Takaba thinks he knows the shape of this feeling, the flexible negative space between them, but distance and time is making it indistinct and harder to discern. It feels like betrayal of his own feelings, and he doesn't like it. "But I'm in love with _you_."

"Akihito," Yoh's annoyance is palpable now. "You can put a different label on us and it will not change anything. You know that, right?"

"I refuse," says Takaba, mulishly pouting into the phone, and immediately changing the subject to ramble about his work at the studio and the joy of dealing with too friendly male models.

Before nagging Takaba about his eating habits and chiding him about getting enough sleep for the night, Yoh tells him, "I don't drive you mad. You've met someone who does. Up to you what you do about it.'

* * *

Asami chose the stage weeks ago: one of those highly pretentious 50,000 yen per plate charity galas with a live band, the seats stuffed with half the members of the National Diet and everyone in Japan who managed to make it on the Global Fortune 500 with spouses and a few obvious hired models. Takaba can hardly believe he's supposed to lose his shit at Asami in front of this, the very idea preposterous, but it certainly creates good reasons for everyone to leave Takaba the fuck alone because if anyone wants to hunt him down after this and hang him, it'd have to be Asami.

They go their separate ways at the reception, before the speeches; Takaba to a group of models slash glorified escorts - only one of which he knows by name, a Fumihiko Sato, Bun-san to everyone - all of them who are too young for this event gathered by the chocolate fountain, and Asami gets cornered by a member of the LDP, an obsequious politician with a slow drawl. A very, very slow drawl.

When the light hits Kirishima's glasses just right in the staff seats ten meters away, it looks a lot like he's smiling.

Dinner's decent, not worth 50k per plate, but the champagne is free-flowing and there's five different desserts and he has Bun-san hanging all over him, which is kind of nice because it's driving Asami insane. Bun-san is here to play date for Diet member Kazue Sasaki, and he's drop-dead gorgeous, the kind of lean and lithe build Takaba strived for as a teen but couldn't quite ever get the height. Bun is also obviously gay and flirts with _everyone_ except for his date, whom he treats with a worshipping deferential air, fooling absolutely no one as politician arm candy, and will probably get a reprimand from the agency for his horrible performance.

Honestly, Bun has been all over Takaba since they met at the studio before the whole Ikebukuro mess happened, and nowadays, Takaba flirts back. He's the kind of man that Takaba would be dating if it wasn't for Asami: twenty-two, middling career, fun, doesn't carry guns on his person or keep them in his house - totally harmless.

Asami walks by Takaba when he's a quarter of the way into his third flute of champagne and switches it out for ginger ale.

"That's enough for you," he yanks Takaba away by the waist, and levels a death glare at Bun who just blinks back at him. "If you get dead drunk on five beers you have no business having a third glass of champagne."

"You can't tell me what to do," Takaba waves at Bun apologetically, but Bun's on his way back to Sasaki already. "I'm not drunk."

"You're tipsy. Bubbly." His fingers dig into Takaba's hip beneath the jacket. "Looking a little too happy without me."

Takaba traces over Asami's pocket square with a digit, pretending to be fascinated by the edging lace, taunts, "You jealous or something?"

Maybe he is a little drink. Takaba finds the clinking of glassware, fabric and movement around him all too loud; and the wait for Asami to say something, anything as he stares down with furious eyes, agonising.

Takaba wants something, an equal trade perhaps, a smidgen of honesty for what he thinks he's already given away.

"You are supposed to be my date," Asami leans in, closing the few inches left between them, breathing over the top of Takaba's ear. "Don't embarrass me."

Takaba doesn't like the crowd, the sea of Very Important Strangers, nameless and faceless and just recognisable from watching the evening news rarely. It makes him feel distant, a different person, fully armoured and ready to fight. Asami isn't himself - or perhaps he isn't himself with Takaba in private, and this is fully himself in public, and Takaba hates it with the heat of a thousand flashbulbs. He's cold and dead and reminds Takaba why he wants to get away in the first place.

"Isn't that the point?" Takaba huffs out a laugh, "Besides, you're embarrassing yourself."

Only Asami Ryuichi can drag his male lover around for weeks to public events and not get a shred of coverage in the papers, but this room's full of politicians, old fogey homophobes who wouldn't even let the equal marriage act get a floor vote, and Takaba feels personally attacked just standing in the room.

"Hardly." Asami plants a heated, knee weakening touch of his lips to Takaba's temple. "I've never hidden what I am. It has been ... useful."

"Are you insinuating that you've used your masculine wiles to get favours with gay politicians," Takaba says, only to receive a very suggestive raise of an eyebrow. "Oh my god you have."

"I will neither confirm nor deny that allegation." Asami rubs a circle over Takaba's hipbone, hidden by the flap of his jacket, before letting him go. "Well, go mingle. We can get mad at each other officially in forty-five minutes."

Takaba feels listless, that small little revelation opening up to observations he wouldn't be making otherwise; men leaning too close when they speak to Asami, touching the back of his elbow to catch his attention, looking up at him with starstruck eyes. It's dark and ugly, pinches at him like a pin that's been left in his dress shirt.

"Your boyfriend is really hot," remarks Bun, who's back and without his date.

"I haven't decided if I want him for a boyfriend," Takaba says, kind of sickened by his emotions and mad at himself for them. "He makes me feel terrible."

Bun is all knowing smiles. "Is that the one who sent all the flowers?"

"Ugh," Takaba winces. "Let's forget about the rose-pocalypse."

"Think he would have kept going if you hadn't called him back?" Asami's still occasionally glaring at them from across the room, but less so - Bun's keeping his hands to himself.

"I wouldn't doubt it. He's crazy." Takaba makes a face over his ginger ale. "Completely batshit. Sane men would have stopped at one bouquet."

"Oh my, you're a maudlin drunk," Bun laughs. "He's crazy about _you_."

"No, just crazy, and I happen to be the current target of said crazy," Takaba tries to explain, holding back vital information that maybe he's gone a little crazy too. "I don't know, Bun. I thought dating someone is supposed to be fun."

"Dating can be fun. Being in love isn't," Bun says, light and flirtatious, trailing a finger over Takaba's arm. "I mean, look."

It's a good sized banquet room, and Asami's at least thirty meters away standing with important people, probably, people he's guarded around, but for a second Takaba feels a glint of gold, a shocking, murderously sharp look sent this way. Takaba decides then and there that passion is just another name for temporary insanity, probably a valid defense for murder in some countries. The cons list for dating Asami is just getting longer and longer, and whatever Asami has is apparently contagious because Takaba can't seem to find the strength to _care._

He hears an echo, words from a lifetime ago; _I can’t help myself._

"I can't do this," Takaba mumbles, mind made up, and shoves his drink at Bun.

Takaba marches up to Asami with intent. He's still tipsy, it's been all of ten minutes, but he's ready to throw a tantrum right about now; his cheeks are on fire, a tingle, a prickle, an itch, an annoyance building in the pit of his stomach. There's a throbbing headache moving from the top of his spine to his temples, an incessant ringing in his ears, and he can feel his heart beating out of his chest like a drum.

He is so very angry, an unreasonable rage rising up like champagne bubbles fit to burst - at the inevitability of Asami Ryuichi's very existence.

"Takaba?" He must look a mess. Asami is attentive, his eyebrows drawing together in a knot as he reaches out. "Are you alright?"

"No, I'm not alright." Takaba slaps away the hand about to reach his shoulder. "I am not fucking - alright."

Asami tips his head, all gentlemanly concern, "Is there something to this evening that does not agree with you?"

Takaba points at Asami's chest. "That is not agreeing with me."

"My," Asami makes a show of fixing his cravat, "tie?"

"That," and all Takaba can do is keep pointing, jabbing his finger into the waistcoat this time, "That is exactly what I'm talking about."

The fucking dead face in front of a crowd of strangers when he's so alive in private, the flashes of honesty he doles out like a miser and the loss of control over Takaba's minor crush on Jerry Yan and the compliments when Takaba threatens him with broken glass, the driving Takaba into an irrational corner, out of his emotional comfort zone, marked 'here be literal dragons,' where he must now live - none of it agrees with him, none of it belongs in the life he wants to create for himself.

The other guests have slowly backed away from them by now, failing miserably in their act of not eavesdropping.

"I think you've had too much to drink." Asami grabs his hand and Takaba slaps it away from him in an arc, the momentum throwing Takaba off balance so much he has to right himself, but Asami just keeps talking, "We should go."

"I'm not -" Takaba begins to speak, and it's the line he's supposed to say but he can't finish it, the words stick like a fishbone.

"I see." Asami looks at him, looks past him; a corner of his mouth twitches up in something that only looks like a smile if you don't know what Asami Ryuichi smiling looks like.

Takaba remembers their first meeting in Shanghai, curious about the man Feilong was so hung up on, catching the eyes of a dead man across an ornate hotel lobby. Asami moved, and talked, smiled, and shook hands, the very mimesis of a refined businessman, his life all sealed up tight with a wine cork behind bottle glass, dark, mysterious, deep red and opaque, that rare bit of humour in the elevator merely a whiff. It had been pure curiosity then - what's behind all that, what tool would it take to cut a line through his sternum, tear him open to see what's inside, what will he find: gears or a beating heart?

Takaba will tell you that watching someone die is the most difficult thing he's ever done, but nothing prepares him for Asami's slow dying in front of him, all the lights illuminating him pulling back in seconds, those human moments locked up again until he is a placid mask of serenity and perfect upbringing, perfectly lifeless.

"Tch, and then you go and do that." Takaba's not stupid, knows full well that Asami is even more of a manipulative bastard than Feilong, better at playing Takaba like a harp by far, and he knows exactly what he's doing.

Takaba wants the Asami that sat on the opposite side of his king sized bed, chain smoking with chewed nails, wearing all of his imperfections on his sleeve.

Whatever they have right now is quicksand. Takaba doesn't know how to fix it - there's nothing to fix in Asami, he's no puzzle box, isn't a tangle of secrets he's misinterpreted and built a misplaced life upon. Asami doesn't need him as a friend, doesn't need his shoulder to cry on, whatever pain he carries he's perfectly capable of holding onto until the end of time, his heart is a black box of a plane in flight. Takaba came out of Hong Kong so confident, twenty-one and a know-it-all, and Asami's barged into his life like a lost continent, wild and overgrown, everything that lives in it deadly.

"I can't do this." Takaba runs a hand through his hair, all his excuses flowing through the cracks in him like water. "I can't fucking leave you - what is wrong with me."

Takaba doesn't know where he stands, only certain that he doesn't want this - them - to be nothing, doesn't want Asami to leave him alone. It pisses him off how inevitable it feels. He's fought so hard against it, there's so much emotional sunk value in his independence, grinding his teeth at night over breaking up with Asami and what was it all for.

Asami takes Takaba by one hand and pulls him close, until he's parked to his hip and tucked under a shoulder, Takaba's head beneath his chin. "Then don't leave me."

He doesn't add 'ever,' which is very smart of him since Takaba is overwrought and wound up, ready to spring.

"I won't." Though, Takaba feels the need to add, "Not today."

Asami gazes sidelong at him, unbearably fond. "Stubborn brat."

"Stuck-up asshole." It's only mild sniping, he's finding it hard to come up with expletives when Asami is smiling. "Everyone is trying not to stare at us."

Asami touches two fingers to Takaba's back along a suit seam, pressing in lightly where the fabric splits, "Shall we go?"

It’s middling June, near the end of the rainy season, umbrellas in full flower beneath the tall tower this gala is being held, and the trails of water running down the windows as they wait for the elevator are multi-coloured from the city lights - Tokyo's only starry sky. The hallway is deserted.

"Let's redo this thing," Asami says, before pushing Takaba against the glass and kissing him soft as butterfly wings, too tender, with slow licks over his lips and far too much sentiment.

Takaba thinks he's never been kissed like this either. It feeds something in his chest he hasn't known was hungry, and all the ugly emotions, the flare of jealousy he hasn't known he could feel, the resentment of being too close and yet not close enough, turns into something else entirely, something soft and glittering, fully winged.

It makes him feel shy, and being in public is the perfect excuse to push Asami away when they need to breathe. "Wait."

Asami has one arm around Takaba's waist, holding him close, another bracing against the window as if he could fall. "I have been very patient with you."

"Then you can wait until we get back to my place," Takaba says, not expecting the scowl he gets for that. "We're already in Setagaya - What's wrong with my place?"

"Everything." Asami disentangles himself and pulls them into the elevator.

It's awkward silence all the way down, and it follows them out into the limo until the door closes and Asami tackles him to the couch. Takaba decides to let him have his way for now, his head's still fizzy from champagne and the shakiness of hastily shed temper, and Asami's achingly gentle with him; his lips are soft, tastes of scotch and the sweetness of distant smoke, and it's maddening how much of Takaba he has already - there is a file inside Takaba with Asami's name on it, carrying his scent, filled with fresh negatives barely dry of quiet moments taken in moonlight and the dusky corner of a club or the bright overhead lights of his genkan, piano softly plucking out lines from First Love.

Feilong's old garden had been covered in magnolias, the place Takaba heard Asami's name for the first time, and Asami is forever tied to the cloying lemonade of velvety red petals. Reality is nothing like it; reality is Asami's rough edges, sandalwood and musk clad in bad habits, stubble rasping against Takaba's chin, it's Asami's hands, large and eloquent as they stroke poetry into Takaba's arms, thumbing the underside of a nipple, firm over the wings of his hips.

He pulls Takaba's suit jacket half off, rucked down to the elbows, trapping his arms, but Takaba makes a sound, like he's missing the feel of Asami's lips, and Asami’s drawn back to where the skin is sweet and soft to suck on a pout.

"I really," Asami rakes his teeth over Takaba's lower lip, making him shiver, and half speaks into his mouth, "can't stand your apartment. Feilong has turned it into a death trap. I half expect to get stabbed if I so much as sit on a dining room chair." His mouth moves down to Takaba's jaw, leaving a line of dark marks over the jaw line to the side of the neck, and there, he bites down. It's fiery instinct for Takaba to raise his hips then, to diminish whatever space is left in between them.

It's true, Feilong outfitted the place for Takaba's safety, but Asami's been the most human at the condo, shown more of his faces than at five-star restaurants or the way he sits ramrod straight at theatres he's dragged Takaba to. "Is this the time to insult my new home?"

"We're heading to my penthouse," Asami says, the smug line of his mouth and the glint in his eyes so damn happy that Takaba doesn't have the heart to protest.

Asami carries him like a bride through the lobby, walking fast past the concierge (which is mortifying) but less so than walking past him with a hard-on, so Takaba lets him and hides his burning cheeks in the lapels of Asami's jacket. There is something more than champagne glittering in his veins, something new and exciting that shines and turns streetlamps into globes of light, makes the world dazzle, his earlier turbulent passions forgotten. He sees it in Asami's eyes too as they come up for air between kisses in the elevator, pupils dark and blown as Takaba finds his footing, and he pulls Asami down to him by the cravat, loosening the knot with clumsy fingers. They spend an eternity in the genkan pressed up against the wall next to a set of light switches, kissing until he's dizzy, giggling over a rasp of stubble on his eyelid.

"Bath?' Takaba asks, knowing exactly what the answer would be as they shed shoes and jackets and ties down the long hallway to Asami's bedroom.

"You still smell like soap," Asami growls into Takaba's collar, into the divot between his collarbones as he carries Takaba through the hall, legs wrapped around Asami's hips, "No time."

He sounds frayed, and Takaba's not sure what it is about the smell of soap that drives him mad, but he's more teeth than tongue, combs his fingers through Takaba's fringe to push the blond tips into the mattress, pinning him but not so hard that he can't move at all. It exposes the line of his neck, already covered in darkening red bites, already wet as Asami breathes across it, making his hair stand on end. Asami's reaching down to undress Takaba, pulling his pants off, but he's not ready yet - not ready to let Asami take control over his pleasure.

This time, when he goes to bat Asami's hand away so he can sit up, he's let go instantly.

"You're wearing too many layers," Takaba says, his hands shaking with want, with reckless curiosity, popping a button off Asami's waistcoat in his haste and groaning softly as another line of buttons are exposed, tiny pearl cuffs that are so elegant in detail, and no one except Takaba gets to see it.

Takaba thinks it's that exact crystal of a thought that drives him mad - the possession he feels at the touch of Asami's skin, the wish to monopolise all of him, down to the cuffs hidden beneath a cravat.

The cuffs, he decided, are impossible, and the only other option is through the clothes.

"Eager, are we?" Asami sits back on his heels as Takaba holds onto Asami's belt and open mouth breathes into the fabric of his pants, right over his half hard cock. The area warms up immediately, and as Takaba adds each breath, the heat is trapped and multiplied until it's fit to immolate, and it forces Asami to hard and aching in less than a minute.

Takaba licks his lips, "Now, who's eager?"

"Neat trick." Asami undoes his belt and frees his considerable erection, leaning back to let Takaba pull off his pants and underwear in one go. His bangs have fallen from its style, hanging rakishly over his eyebrows, making him look years younger.

Takaba crawls forward on his hands and knees, nuzzles into the wiry hair at the base of Asami's cock, licks that line of oh so sensitive skin between thigh and hip, lets his voice vibrate through. "Take off your shirt."

Asami's fingers are clawing the sheets, his eyes dark and dangerous above Takaba, and his fingers are slow to obey and slower to get at each cuff, from the bottom up, revealing his well defined abs first, the underside of his pecs, the twin lines of his collarbone sharp as they catch the light while the shirt falls from his arms.

"Like what you see?" Asami grins, too smug.

Takaba takes long moments to answer, lets his eyes roam over Asami's seemingly perfect body, finding all the miniscule imperfections; little faded scars on the outside of his forearms, a tiny mole on the left shoulder, all the secrets no one can guess at, sealed way in Takaba's vault, his personal little treasures.

"Uh huh," Takaba smiles, cups Asami's balls with one hand and swallows his dick down in one go.

It's not particularly difficult; it's never about the size, it's about the shape of the crown, and Asami has the kind of dick that just nestles in his throat when Takaba stretches his neck out to a straight line. He hears a flattering gasp from above him, Asami's hands tightening in the sheets and bucking into his mouth once. Takaba swallows around it before letting go, lets it slide all the way down the flat of his tongue before swirling and popping on the top. The rhythm he's setting is easy, slow, probably crazy-making, and after a few minutes Asami's moving his hips to it, and Takaba takes Asami's hands and places them on either side of his own head and falls into the haze, that light-headed high of getting his mouth fucked.

Asami's gentle at first, thrusts shallow and very accommodating, but Takaba can take more so he demands with hands on Asami's hips, guiding him into something a little less controlled, deeper and near as hard as he can take, on the edge of pain and gagging.

The hands on his head grows tight, blocking out every sound. Through his clumped lashes he sees Asami as a blur, the sharpness of his eyes narrowed and wild. It makes Takaba's cock twitch, and he's rutting at the air, leaking into the sheets and getting so hard he makes a thudding sound on the bed when his cock bounces off the mattress.

He thinks he hears Asami warn him, the words coming to him indistinct through the hands over his ears, and he stops Asami's hips from leaving by holding him down, holds his breath and let the muscles of his throat engulf the crown, the pulsing that almost hurts a distant hum, so turned on he barely feels it. He stares wide-eyed and dizzy as Asami comes down his throat, his hips jerking in Takaba's hands, mouth dropping open in ecstacy.

Takaba feels his dick twitch, feels himself too big for his own skin, like he could crawl out of the cocoon of himself and be nothing but want and lust watching Asami lose it; he's tight and hot all over, thinks he may come if Asami so much as breathe on him.

Takaba pulls off and swallows deeply, and he's scratchy and swollen but he can't see straight, filled with giddiness as he lies on his side. He stares up at Asami with a wide grin as Asami strokes fingers over Takaba's cheeks, his jaw, his throat, clouded with lust but with an overlying concern, and maybe seeing how nothing's really hurting, he descends and kisses Takaba sideways.

His lips are cold and his mouth is dry, and it makes Takaba grin into him, kissing into him with literal giggles.

"What is so funny?" It's apparently contagious, so Asami's grinning too, softly laughing in between pecking at his lips. "Do share."

Takaba doesn't have a reason, only feels unreasonably euphoric, and he comes up with something he's read about ages back about lack of air and giddiness, his voice a total wreck, "I need oxygen, probably."

"I'd say." Asami reaches between Takaba's legs and brushes his fingers over Takaba's balls, already drawn tight against his body. He scratches a blunt nail down the line in the middle, all the way up the shaft, stopping just short of the crown. "All your oxygen went down here."

Asami's fingers are lovely, his callouses give just the right amount of friction, but Takaba doesn't want to come like this, so he crawls along the sheets until he can get his mouth on Asami's cock again, half soft but definitely interested, and gives it soft, teasing licks until it's at full mast.

Takaba stops long enough to ask, "Where do you keep the lube?"

There's three unopened bottles of ridiculous multi-flavoured lube in Asami's bedside table, along with two boxes of unopened condoms, which raises all sorts of questions but now is not the time, so he trades one kind of curiosity for another, gets past all the cellophane and rolls a condom on Asami with his mouth.

"How do you want it?" Asami asks, as Takaba tries the lube, licking up the side of him, tasting chocolate mint.

Takaba pushes Asami onto his back, and crawls over him. "You just lie there and don't move," and when Asami lifts an eyebrow at him, curious, he adds, "Not a centimeter."

Takaba lays his cock next to Asami's, dripping and red and his skin so tight he aches, and pours an ungodly amount of lube over them both because he's so going to need it. He shifts his weight all to his knees, lines up Asami's cock with his hole, entirely unprepared and tight, but he knows his body well enough to know what he needs, and though the burn is excruciating, it's hot and good and the stretch will be amazing.

"You'll hurt yourself," Asami says, sounding strained with his hands fisted in the sheets and the effort of not moving, how tight Takaba must be, his body fighting the intrusion. "Let me finger you first."

"Thanks, but I'm about to explode." Takaba feels as if he's on fire, he’s taking deep breaths to calm his heart that refuses to slow, and the crown isn't even in yet. "And I'd rather do that on your cock, so no thanks."

Asami has a look in his eyes like he's hungry, starving and full of teeth, insides covered in sharp things and all of them wants to eat Takaba alive, and Takaba thinks he can get used to this, stretching himself from the inside out on Asami's cock watching Asami watch him. When he finally gets the crown in, the sudden lock of it inside him is overwhelming and a keening sound rolls out of his throat, as his toes curl into themselves, the tears streaming down his cheeks hot and spontaneous. It's tight, too tight, excruciating and yet it lights him up liquid hot up his spine, the pleasure of it bone-deep.

"Oh - oh, fuck,' Takaba exclaims, his thighs trembling with his efforts, his head swimming with the buzz of being filled and with that elusive pain-pleasure, forced open beyond his endurance. He lets himself sink down the rest of the way, rolling his hips back to angle Asami's cock at that delicious spot inside that makes his entire body tremble, calling out, "Now, now, touch me now."

Asami doesn't have to be asked twice; Takaba's already covered in lube so when Asami's big band closes over him, covers him and strokes, it's all enclosed heat and soft friction, and Takaba's so close already he feels himself losing it within two pulls of his cock, feels his body stutter and clamp down. It draws him over, and he comes as gentle as riding the crest of a wave, moaning loudly as he lets himself unravel, spurting all over Asami's fingers with slow, rhythmic grinds of his hips.

Takaba looks out through the mess that he's made of himself, through the tears and his reddened eyes, just in time to catch Asami bring his hand to his lips and licking Takaba's spend off his fingers. It's enough to make him want again, even if he can't be hard again yet, not while filled up like this, with Asami still iron hard inside him, and his body giving off intermittent squeezes down below.

Then Asami makes a face while saying, "This stuff is too sweet."

"Hah, then why did you get it?" Takaba laughs, the sound bubbling out of him rough and low sounding because he's even more wrecked now than he was after getting his throat fucked.

It's funny how they get along the way he hasn't ever thought they could, how Asami fills his head with such brilliant effervescence it spills out of him, entirely irrepressible.

"You seem to like it just fine," Asami's looking at him full of lust again, fire banked behind the dark coals of his pupils, desire like a pair of jeans with its seams ripped, frayed edges obvious and folded to the front, and he sounds like a prowling, caged beast. "Can I move now?"

Takaba thinks he's firmly on this side now, has a place of honour in Asami's sorting grid, and though his emotions are still new and raw, half the time he feels terrible and wrung about, right now the vertiginous high of being with him is worth more than the dark moments when he wants to tear his hair out. He's taken enough for now, he thinks. The white shirt still hanging on his shoulders, covered in cum and wrinkled all to hell, is starting to feel uncomfortable, and he wants a taste of whatever Asami's hiding, the wild beast under all that varnish, wants to know just how much Asami wants to push him in only their first night.

"Yes you can," Takaba commands, giving control over for the night. "Go on, fuck me, up against the wall, on the dresser, bend me over wherever -"

His sentence is never finished, for in a second Asami has turned the tables, crushing Takaba beneath him, and Takaba is reminded of the hunger he’s seen, made of sharp claws and teeth and all of it ravenous.

As night begins to blend into morning, with dawn creeping over the horizon and the room brightens with the wash of pale light that colours everything blue and white, Takaba is swollen and sore, too sensitive, and thinks he's finished, thinks he can't possibly come anymore; but he's given up his control, and Asami's not done with him.

Asami ties Takaba's wrists behind his back and rolls Takaba's weight onto this shoulders, bending him double, trapping him with Asami's weight the way he's been trapped most of the night, and licks, leisurely, thoroughly into Takaba's fucked out hole. Each stroke of Asami's tongue makes him shiver, so spent he can barely take it but feeling too good to want him to stop. When Asami finally takes mercy on him and tugs at Takaba's cock with already familiar hands, he comes in near surprise, shuddering dry and violently from the force of his orgasm, sobbing out Asami's name.

* * *

By the time Asami holds him close and pulls a blanket over them, he's half in a dream, and Asami's whispering by his ear, and even with only breath ghosting over skin there is a tangible tremor, "Takaba - want only me."

Takaba gives no answer, pretending that he’s already asleep, and thinks for a moment that he will not make promises he can't keep. Though he may be halfway there already; he wants Asami most.

* * *

Asami sleeps exactly the way Takaba expects him to: soundly, without guilt, and a complete possessive sod. He hogs the blanket, leaving Takaba no choice but to stick close to him, sleep curled in the warmth of him, and when he wakes, it's with the aches of being handled over half the bedroom furniture _and_ the joy of cuddling with a person who feels as though they have zero percent body fat. The marks Asami left on him has blossomed into bruises and it looks like he's marked Asami plenty himself, with crescent shaped indentations on the tops of his shoulders and his hips, scratches on his back, and he thinks Asami looks good in them; odds and ends and all things that do not fit into perfection, each bearing Takaba's signature.

"You are making me breakfast," Takaba demands, as the person who renders the other immobile gets to be mom. He did not make the rules, but they exist in the nebulous ether of what to do after sex, and must be followed. "I want eggs benedict with smoked salmon, chorizo sausages, mushrooms and caramelised onions. Also orange juice."

Predictably Asami picks up the phone and orders catering from the Sion building and explains, "I don't really eat here. The fridge is empty."

"Your place is so dead." Takaba feels every right to insult Asami's penthouse, as Asami has insulted Takaba's condo enough himself, and because at this very moment he is so very sore and feels Asami deserving of _all the insults_. Maybe he should have ordered congee, even the roof of his mouth is sore. "It's like you bought the furnished model suite and just kept everything as is."

Asami looks down at him, deadpans, "It's half true. I bought the place furnished."

"No way," Takaba exclaims, filled with a desperate need to make fun of him some more but that is actually some pathetic shit and he actually feels bad wanting to rip into Asami over it.

Catering sends them two portions of exactly what Takaba asked for, which sounds far too busy with flavours until all the layers are wrapped in one bite. Asami looks skeptical at it until he tries it. "This is good."

"There's a place near Causeway Bay Feilong took me to, that has the best brunch," Takaba says, digging into his eggs benedict and clearly enjoying it in the way only he can. "This is pretty close."

Takaba can guess why Asami gets inscrutable and quiet sometimes when he mentions anything about Hong Kong, but he lived there for more than a year, it's a big chunk of his adult life - all of it, technically - and he's not going to spare Asami's feelings and feed his possessiveness, to pretend his heart isn't also elsewhere.

Family and what they have can exist in the same space, and his red threads to Hong Kong are so tangled and braided already, so strong and gold tinged, it feels eternal - but he's sure he can make room in it for one more.

"I plan on going back, you know." Takaba figures now's as good a time as any to bring up their visits. "Every couple of months or so. And New Year's. Feilong says he'll visit on the off months, but he'll probably be too busy."

"I see," Asami says simply.

Takaba thinks he wants Asami to come along, to walk Bird Street together with the scent of roasted seed that smells suspiciously like fresh cookies, to stroll through old temples hidden in between Tonglau with him, to watch Asami wince over smoking cones of incense, buying him sugar rice dough puppets from street hawkers, to walk in a city where nobody knows them by their faces.

Asami, as if reading the flashes of emotions crossing Takaba's face, offers, "Maybe in a few months I'll come along with you."

It's casual sounding enough that Takaba's able to nod along. "I'd like that."

* * *

Hours later, after Asami's brought him back home and they kissed goodbye at the door like a couple of teenagers, Takaba plugs his dead phone in to find it full of text messages and a dozen missed calls.

_I heard you two didn't manage to break up - LFL_

_Pick up the phone - LFL_

_Since neither of you are picking up the phone I'm going to assume things and have dirty thoughts about you - LFL_

_Did you enjoy my housewarming present? - LFL_

_I'm sorry that my boss is being such a pest, I've taken the phone away from him. - Yoh_

He's probably going to regret this, but he picks up the phone - still plugged in, 10% battery warning - and dials Asami. "Did Feilong give me a housewarming present?"

"Yes," and even at this distance, downgraded to digital and the bandwidth of 3G, it sounds like Asami is trying very hard not to laugh.

Takaba thinks he should be mad if something was kept from him, but he doesn't feel anger so much as curiosity - yet. "Um, shouldn't I have gotten it?"

"You did get it." And Asami does laugh, a full-belly chuckle that Takaba wishes he can actually see in person, not just over the phone. "Long and hard. For hours. You especially liked the mint chocolate."

"Oh my fucking god," Takaba cusses, adds five different ones in Cantonese. (A most satisfying language to swear in.)

"Don't get mad," Asami says between _snorting_ at him, which is ludicrous while Takaba is already barking like a Kowloon dockworker on the other side of the line.

Maybe to Takaba, they're a dilemma he struggled over for weeks and weeks. To Feilong, who has apparently gift wrapped him for Asami with care packages, they have always been a foregone conclusion.

Takaba decides that Asami Ryuichi is the most terrible, passively aggressive possessive asshole he's ever known, whose crimes now extend to stealing Takaba's lube and condoms to make sure he can't sleep with anyone else. If he didn't like Asami so much already - too much by far and way more than the bastard deserves - Takaba's liable to jump through the phone, physics be damned, just to strangle him with his office landline. And excluding Yoh - who is a _saint_ , thank you very much - the men in his life are plagued terminally with the affliction of the beautiful: irredeemably rotten personalities through and through, wearing it as naturally as roses wear their thorns.

But as he listens to Asami's laughter, clear and genuine, infectious, a sound Takaba has plucked out of the instrument of Asami all on his own, he thinks that to colour this one rose red, he will hang his heart on a thorn; and though love is terrifying, and passion is still a secret he's barely scratched the surface of, Takaba is going to let something new grow - for his heart is infinite, as boundless as the ocean.

* * *

It's months before Akihito tells Asami over his third champagne flute of his fears, why he took so long to fall into Asami's arms in the first place.

They’re in Akihito’s condo, lights turned low. The place looks much the same but for a blue -white China ashtray on the coffee table, a present from Akihito for his birthday.

He's curled up in Asami's lap on the couch, mumbling into Asami's shoulder, and tells him his little analogy: how he saw Asami as a bonfire and himself fragile as tinder, feeling as if he would be engulfed in the light of him, to burn up in the heat of him if he ventured too close to the flames.

Funny what the young and bright never notice in themselves: to Asami, who's heard about an Akihito through rumours and whispers, through surreptitious photographs and Yoh's evasive - only regarding Akihito - reports, Akihito has always been the blazing fire, and Asami a moth to the flame.

Akihito is the fire that burns so bright he’s dazzling, the end spiral of every golden ratio, the heart of a collapsed star. And men like him can only be helplessly drawn, forever trapped in his orbit.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You have Green_Destiny to thank for the later, romance part of this being longer, because they said it was too short. /what can i say i love these two
> 
> Jingumae - is in Aoyama, and very much heart of the fashion district. ~20 minute drive from Shinjuku.  
> Ni-chome - you read Yaoi you know where that is :)  
> Choi - a thing you say in Cantonese if you hear something you don't like. It doesn't really mean anything? Like, if your loved one say, "I don't think I have long to live." You'd exclaim, "Choi!"  
> Diu lay lo mo puk gai ham gaa caan - is FOUL, but it trips off the tongue nicely and manages to a) use the F word b) insult the other person's mother c) curse them d) curse their entire family. Usually learned by the age of 10.  
> Shashimo - Japanese smelt full of eggs, deep fried. Yum.  
> Nitsuke - a slow simmered stew.  
> Kinpira - root vegetables. Choice of veg at an Izakaya is limited.  
> Mixi - like facebook, before there was FB.  
> Tsingtao - Pronounced Qing-Dao. Lager but with RICE. Rice makes everything better.  
> Fumihito - It's written 文彦, and shortened to 文 (Bun). It is confusing. I don't make these rules.
> 
> * * *
> 
> Couple more things: 1) The Baishe headquarters is canonically on Hong Kong Island. I moved it to Kowloon because ~~I like it more it's just more interesting~~ it has historical triad presence. 2) Infernal Affairs wasn't completed by this time, but *shrugs*
> 
> * * *
> 
> And that's a wrap! This is the first thing I wrote in four years - how exciting is that? And it has a checkmark! Gah. I'm so happy about the checkmark. Also, you guys are a most welcoming fandom and I'll be all cozied up over here for a while.
> 
> Much thanks to Green_Destiny for the beta, mutuals on tumblr who don't even go here who encouraged me even though they wouldn't go near this manga, and the manga for being such a perfect scaffolding to build a what-if around.

**Author's Note:**

> So, about that story Asami promised Akihito? The one he says he'd tell him on the seventh date? It has been written. It is 17k of Asami/Yoh childhood backstory written in prose and it's not a happy story, so consider yourself warned [before clicking on it.](https://archiveofourown.org/works/13704891)
> 
> I'm on tumblr if you want to come yell at me as I work on other things that may or may not be related to this.  
> <http://foxghost.tumblr.com>


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